[In the following excerpt, Loughery pans Valparaiso.]

Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso concerns a man who buys a plane ticket to Valparaiso, Indiana, and ends up in Valparaiso, Chile. This mildly amusing idea might have yielded a good light comedy. It is certainly plausible; I recall some years ago a couple intending to go to Panama City, Panama, ending up in Panama City, Florida, just as a hurricane hit, stranding them there for days. This became a running joke in Florida, where the northern Gulf Coast is referred to as “the redneck Riviera.”

Valparaiso, however, is no comedy, but a hyperserious social problem play, focussing on how the hero’s misadventure is treated in the press and on television. Brustein, in a program note, maintains that the play “exposes the media’s ravenous invasion of privacy,” but this is false. The hero, Michael Majeski, wants to be interviewed. He gives up his job, signs autographs, even has a Web site. The reporters and interviewers in the play are often bored with him (as are we) and his silly escapade, and if anything are reluctant to pry. Everything is seen from Majeski’s point of view, with nothing much about the inner workings of the media.

Nevertheless, by focussing on his hero’s obsession with achieving instant fame, DeLillo might still have written a good play. Unfortunately, this obsession goes nowhere. Everything is presented through exposition rather than action, including the original trip. Majeski tells the story over and over, until you want to scream. A parody of the Oprah Winfrey show drags on forever, without evoking a single laugh. There is a lot of pseudopoetic dialog, as in, “Her nipples are sensitive to messages from orbiting satellites.” Halfway through the second act, something finally happens; Majeski’s wife becomes pregnant by another man. But even this event (presented again through exposition) goes nowhere. The conclusion shows Majeski re-enacting the flight while the Oprah figure and her sidekick chant more poetry. Majeski apparently tried to commit suicide by asphyxiating himself in a restroom on the plane. I still am not sure what to make of this, since it has nothing to do with fame or the media. Perhaps it is meant to suggest that his original going astray was intentional, and that a desire for fame has something to do with a death wish.

David Wheeler directed this maladroit piece, with good contemporary settings by Karl Eigsti and costumes by Catherine Zuber. The cast was quite competent; Will Patton as the hero had a nice, bland, Midwestern look, and was quite well spoken, while the rest of the cast were all better than their counterparts in Ibsen’s Master Builder. The failure of this production relates back to the playwright alone.