Valparaiso
Written by Don Delillo
Directed by Hal Brooks
At the Blue Heron Arts Center
123 East 24th Street
212-414-5136
Review by Christine Boylan
The byways of language—pauses, repetitions, the halted raconteur style of speech—is familiar to readers of novelist Don Delillo. He uses style to express the dark, self-mutilating and yet self-aggrandizing impulses of characters, who often personify solipsistic self-love and loathing.
Valparaiso, Delillo’s second play (his first, The Day Room, was produced at American Repertory Theatre in 1998), treads old ground in its subject matter: Michael Majeski (played with brilliant subtlety by Matthew Lawler) finds himself the center of worldwide media attention when a simple business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana, turns into two flights, one to Valparaiso, Florida, and the other to Valparaiso, Chile. The play consists entirely of Michael being interviewed for various media outlets, giving the same pat answers to personal questions and telling his “charming little story” again and again, until both he and the story unravel.
It’s an American tragedy, since it only differentiates between two classes (there are the famous and the nameless), and Majeski’s tragic flaw is present in the very first lines as he struggles to be the brilliant, witty person deserving of the fame suddenly thrust upon him. The play, first presented at the A.R.T. in 1998 (where I first saw it) had a subsequent staging by Steppenwolf in 2000. Both productions left audiences with a feeling of having missed something, a feeling of almost-great, almost-perfect.
The Rude Mechanicals Theater Company has taken this almost-play and given it, finally, the interpretation it deserves. This is achieved mainly through casting. Matthew Lawler knows how to handle Delillo’s language in an evocative way—natural, but never losing the stylized sense that this play is happening within the most unnatural of circumstances––a nightmare.
The company is very professional, and conscious of the humor, pathos and energy in each beat of the play. Andrew Benator particularly stands out, as one of the interviewers and a member of the chorus in the second act. When he’s interviewing Majeski, Benator has some of the funniest, and most integral, lines of the play: “Everything is on the record. Everything is the interview.” This is heavy stuff, and Benator doesn’t miss the comic possibilities in playing it completely straight.
Elizabeth Sherman, as Mike’s exercise-obsessed, philandering wife Livia, really blossoms in the free-for-all of the second act. The talk show, where Livia hits the heights of her neuroticism and Mike faces the truth about his jaunt around the world, sounds like a gimmick. In the ART production, it felt like one, but director Hal Brooks makes it seem like a brilliant structural move. The Greek chorus of flight attendants, who chant repetitive safety instructions in lieu of television commercials, offer twisted prayers to industry on Michael’s behalf—a far cry from, and yet in the same spirit as a traditional chorus’ pleas to the gods.
Where the ART production of Valparaiso was unwieldy, Brooks insures that this one is crisp. David Fitzgerald as Teddy and Carla Harting as Delfina, the talk-show dynamos of the second act, physicalize Delillo’s language. Fitzgerald is smug in all the right ways, playing to, with and over the audience, while Harting is as needy and ruthless as any talk show host needs to be.
Mike Errico’s haunting, Thomas Newman-type music and Mark Barton’s lighting underscore David Korins’ set, with its pale blue interior-of-an-airplane feel, dotted by red and orange “modern” furniture.
The Rude Mechanicals production has ranked Valparaiso with Delillo’s other major works, and emphasized the innovation and professionalism of this troupe of actors.
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