Valparaiso

Deep thoughts: Matt Saunders (left) and Kimberly S. Fairbanks share a moment in Theatre Exile's Valparaiso.

by Toby Zinman

You know that TV commercial where a family gets into a homemade space transporter, pushes the button marked "St. Petersburg" and wind up in Russia instead of Florida? This play takes the same premise: A man on his way to a business meeting in Valparaiso, Ind., winds up in Valparaiso, Fla., and then the error is seriously compounded when he goes on to Valparaiso, Chile.

Don DeLillo, the snarkiest of the postmodernist wordsmiths, who can out-deadpan anybody, usually writes novels (White Noise and Underworld are the most famous; I'm a fan of Mao II, myself). In this 1999 play, he tweaks the nonevent into a two-hour plot, in which Michael Majeski (played with spectacular ordinariness by Matt Saunders) becomes a media celebrity (140 interviews in four and half days) by recounting his experience. We hear him say the same things over and over, word for word -- for print, for TV, for talk radio, for a documentary film. No detail is too small (What brand of dentifrice do you use?) and no detail is too private (describing predawn sex with his wife, he's told, "Use the present tense, please."). This is the way identity is built, by feeding the public's ravenous media hunger. Vacant people interview vacant people for the entertainment of vacant people; as one of the interviewers says, "The term itself -- my life -- is a desperate overstatement." Ed Miller and Erin Reilly play all the interviewers -- Miller could use a little more nasty edge, but Reilly nails it pathetically and scarily.

Act 2 is more theatrically successful than the too-slow Act 1. It's a funny-creepy send-up of the queen of daytime talk shows; Delfina (Kimberly S. Fairbanks in a pitch-perfect performance) delves "deeply" (the play's favorite word) into "the empty brimful thing" that is Michael's celebrity, and leads him toward his culminating "perishability." A surreal chorus of flight attendants (Mikaal Sulaiman, Sarah Doherty, Melissa diLeonardo), dressed in toxic yellow and purple, provide a stylized and synchronized non-commentary ("Then place the mask/ Has anyone had access ").

Mary McCool as the wife creates a shockingly plausible character who is addicted to everything (exercise bicycles, making sandwiches, smoking plastic cigarettes), and Jeb Kreager as Delfina's warm-up/sidekick Teddy is repulsively right. Joe Canuso directs this intriguing production.

VALPARAISO

Through May 23, Theatre Exile at Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-922-4462

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