DAY ROOM, THE

by Delillo, Don

The play opens in a brightly lit hospital room occupied by two men. Budge does Tai Chi exercises while trying to strike up a conversation with Wyatt, but to little avail. Soon they are visited by a series of fellow patients and staff, all of whom may not be what they seem. Oddly normal yet oddly frightening, it soon becomes apparent that they have wandered in from the adjacent psychiatric wing, and are all quite mad. The second half of the play takes place in the day room of the psychiatric ward, and the same performers appear but now in different identities - some claim to be actors, setting the scene for a play-within-a-play; others become tourists looking for a theatre company. Finally, the doctor in charge of the ward appears and proves to be the man who we met at the start of the play and we have come full circle, with the distinctions between appearance and reality, and madness and sanity still tantasingly blurred.