Calling Doctor D
Don DeLillo's Valparaiso explores life as it teeters on the edge of desperation.

By Robert Avila

THE BRAZILIAN WEATHER experts insisted on calling it an "extra-tropical cyclone" and spoke of not wanting to alarm the public; their American counterparts in Miami, meanwhile, studying the same satellite pictures, thought their colleagues' conclusion, in one specialist's phrase, "out to lunch." In the end only one person seems to have died from the mysterious storm (though seven were reported missing). And perhaps it was, after all, just what the professionals and news reports seemed content to suggest: a freak occurrence, a weird but natural phenomenon. Nevertheless, as last month the first hurricane ever recorded in the South Atlantic hovered off Brazil's southern coast, an unspoken but inescapable premonition infused a Weather Channel story with eerie foreboding. Was it the breath of modernity beating against the shores of Santa Catarina? Was the dead eye staring back at the satellite's lens somehow part of the same human-spun mechanism?

Seeing foolsFury's production of Don DeLillo's Valparaiso will do nothing to allay such fears, I can tell you. But no American writer limns the metaphysics of this runaway technological age quite like the author of White Noise and Underworld. Valparaiso, the novelist's second play, which premiered in 1999, continues his research into the chaos and dissociation, the gathering apocalypse, attendant on the "systems" that support the illusory landscape of the mundane. And foolsFURY artistic director Ben Yalom and his cast seem genuinely if fitfully inspired by the material. (In fact, the play forms an apt sequel to their excellent 2002 production of Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life.) With a physical rigor and nervy humor all their own, they bring to DeLillo's sardonic interrogation of the postmodern self a series of animated performances, grounded in an imaginatively stylized form of physical theater that at times gives striking visual shape to the play's central tensions. Everyman Michael Majeski (Rod Hipskind) finds himself an overnight cultural sensation after an airport glitch during a business trip to Valparaiso, Ind., mistakenly lands him in Valparaiso, Chile. With his seriously manic wife, Livia (Csilla Horvath), puffing organic cigarettes by his side (or nearby, furiously peddling atop her exercise bike), Majeski undergoes an ungodly number of interviews in a matter of a few days, several of which we're privy to. In them he gradually hones his real-life adventure into a tasty media morsel as interviewers prod him for every minute detail, insisting they "deeply need to know."

Majeski is more than game. He's a changed man, or so he thinks, awoken out of a lifetime of somnambulant conformity. To devote himself to his celebrity status full-time, he even quits his job. (Not incidentally, Majeski worked as an analyst for a company that "analyzes other companies ... at times, whole industries, whole societies," what he refers to as relationships between "deep mean massive structures.") When one interviewer (Lindsay Anderson), actually impressed by his apparent transformation, expresses doubts about her own personhood, Majeski repeatedly replies from some knowing place a great distance beyond, "That is what I used to do.... That is how I used to feel."

In the calming glow of the camera's eye, then, at the center of the media storm he's set off, Majeski stares back at what he believes to be his true self. He's the "I" dissolving happily in the mechanized gaze of the virtual public – a system in which others binge on an empty diet of vicarious experience and representations of "real" life. Ultimately, however, DeLillo's darkly humorous but highly evocative landscape encompasses more than media voyeurism or Majeski's hunger for a kind of validation called fame. The larger implications of this Baudrillardian hyperreality keep surfacing in the play's language, which itself reaches a climax in the second act's confrontation with the "shining soul of daytime America," talk show hostess Delfina Treadwell (Jessica Jelliffe).

At this point the audience flanking Exit on Taylor's stage becomes Treadwell's studio audience, ably primed for her entrance by the show's announcer and sideman, a sort of offbeat, beatnik Ed McMahon by the name of Teddy Hodel (Jason Craig). Two cameramen prowl the stage casting details of the proceedings on four television monitors suspended at the corners of the room. (In one brief but poignant image near the climax of the scene, a camera frames Majeski against an opposite TV screen, sending his head receding into infinity.) Not content with Majeski's regurgitated story line, Treadwell, a commanding presence in a deathlike mask of studio makeup, probes and prods Majeski and his wife for deeper meanings, their deepest secrets and fantasies, with shattering consequences for their relationship. Finally, she zeroes in on the ultimate meaning of Majeski's mishap-adventure.

But first, Treadwell's interrogation of her hapless guests ("Who are they when they're not here?" Hodel asks) takes time out for a word or two from a sponsor called Reliance Airlines. Acted out by an able-bodied chorus (Anderson, Alexander Lewis, and Kevin Rolston), the commercials amount to an absurd yet haunting physical collage, a blend of advertising piffle with the vaguely ominous phrases of airport security checks and in-flight safety drills. In the end Majeski's unmasking ("Then place the mask, then place the mask," runs the airline ad) at Treadwell's hands makes him a kind of human sacrifice, as the show (and the play) achieves its proper conclusion in a little truth-telling at once self-fulfilling and self-negating. Coming out of the eye of the storm is a risky enterprise. Fasten your seatbelts.

'Valparaiso' runs through May 8. Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, S.F. $15-$25 (sliding scale; Thurs., pay what you can). 1-866-GOT-FURY, www.foolsfury.org.