Valparaiso Don DeLillo

Drama
Full Length

4 men, 3 women (doubling): 7 total
Flexible Set

"A fascinating study of celebrity and its dark path to desperation. DeLillo's lyrical, layered language…makes this black comedy an engaging indictment of our tell-all culture. The unsettling power of VALPARAISO comes from DeLillo's ability to repel and attract us at the same time." —Boston Herald. "VALPARAISO may be the novelist's most satisfying work since White Noise. If art at its finest gets under our skin and changes the way we look at the world, then VALPARAISO is art at its finest. You may never watch television, listen to the radio, or read a newspaper or magazine (not to mention get on an airplane) with the same passivity again. And that makes VALPARAISO, for all its psychic twists and turns, a destination that demands a visit." —Boston Globe. "An eerily cataclysmic ninety-minute ride into the lower depths of contemporary existence. Devastating and chillingly entertaining. A gorgeous, frightening, stunningly poetic riff on dislocation and guilt, sensation and sensationalism, love and loathing. The language spoken is disarmingly poetic, wickedly funny, surprisingly voluptuous and erotic." —Chicago Sun-Timess.

Book/Item: VALPARAISO
Book Type: DPS
Price: $8.00
ISBN/Code: 978-0-8222-1791-6

FEE: $75 per performance.

THE STORY: Michael Majeski boards a plane bound for Valparaiso, Indiana but ends up in Valparaiso, Chile instead. What was to be an ordinary business trip has turned into a major misadventure, and Michael becomes a figure of some celebrity as he relives his experience in a series of intense and sometimes surreal interviews. It becomes gradually clear that there are problems with the story Michael tells, a certain touchy matter involving his wife and a dark spectacle in the making as he enters the interrogation chamber of the daytime talk show, in which nothing remains unseen, nothing is left unsaid. Don DeLillo's second play is funny, profound and discomfiting. It makes poetry out of routine airline announcements and imagines a world—ours—in which everything melts repeatedly into something else, as if driven by the finger on the TV remote.

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