There is something about the stage that lures the normally solitary novelist. Wanting to see his words come to life, he is drawn into a crowded, noisy world of actors and directors, props and costumes, makeup and make-believe. Even such distinguished American writers like Henry James and Ernest Hemingway succumbed to the lure and wrote plays, while others, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, tried their hand at Hollywood. Usually, however, their efforts have not been very successful. James' plays were a terrible disaster; Hemingway's one play, The Fifth Column, set in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, is awkward and heavy-handed. Faulkner only used Hollywood as a means of support, so he could then better devote himself to the extraordinary residents of Yokinapatawpha County; the best thing that Fitzgerald ever wrote in Hollywood was his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.
Savagely Satirical
It is an occasion of some interest, then, when a highly regarded novelist writes a play that turns out to be witty and provocative, leaving one hoping that he will write another. The author in question is Don DeLillo, winner of the 1985 National Book Award for his savagely satirical novel White Noise. The Day Room, an absurdist two-act play about modern medicine, lunacy, acting, television, and death, premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston in 1986. I saw a superb revival at Washington's Woolly Mammoth Theatre this past May.
DeLillo has written nine critically acclaimed novels, the latest of which is his first bestseller, Libra, about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Libra being Oswald's zodiac sign). As Anthony DeCurtis wrote in Rolling Stone, Libra is more a culmination than a departure from DeLillo's earlier books. His first novel, Americana, ends in Daley Plaza, the site of Kennedy's murder, and references to the assassination appear in several of his other books. In Libra, DeLillo describes Kennedy's death as "the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century." Killings and death, in fact, pervade DeLillo novels like Players, Running Dog, The Names, and his award-winning White Noise.
Comic and Cosmic
But all is not sturm und drang in a DeLillo novel, which is invariably leavened by black humor. In fact, critics complain that in his early work DeLillo tried too hard to be funny, to the detriment of character and plot development. In his more recent work, he has generally achieved a balance between the comic and the cosmic.
"White Noise" refers to death, as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt points out in the New York Times, quoting the following dialogue:
Jack Gladney (the novel's protagonist): "What if death is nothing but sound?"
Babette Gladney: "Electrical noise."
Jack: "You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful."
Babette: "Uniform, white."
DeLillo also uses "White
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