Word: valparaiso
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...first act of the play, we meet Michael Majeski (played by Will Paton), newly returned from his trip to Valparaiso, Chile. He becomes an instant celebrity, telling his story to vacuous interviewer after vacuous interviewer. Majeski is a wonderful subject: he always tells the story with the same words, with, as he later notes, "the same thoughtful pauses in the exact same places." He leaves nothing uncovered; his obsessive wife Livia (Caroline Hall) happily joins the circus, offering reporters intimate details about their life and marriage. The reporters eat it up: Livia boasts that Michael has done "65 interviews...
Regardless of cast and set, Valparaiso is clearly and firmly Don DeLillo's play. Despite DeLillo's published statements that the play is much looser than his novels, the script is incredibly tight. Here, DeLillo's inexperience as a playwright shines through: as several reviews have evidenced, the play is too densely constructed for much of the audience to understand in a single viewing. DeLillo's brilliant use of words is wasted by the speed at which they are spoken. Repeated viewings, however, bring to light connective strands of the plot; the script is a sheer pleasure to read...
...metafictional elements of Valparaiso could keep grad students busy for the foreseeable future. The distinction between the play and reality are blurry: as previously noted, the audience of the play becomes the audience of the talk show within the play. DeLillo dedicates the play with no small degree of irony to Frank Lentricchia (author of Introducing Don DeLillo), a man who has built a career out of explicating DeLillo. It's a telling gesture: the vast majority of the press for Valparaiso has centered not around the play and what it means but the author himself. Newspapers and magazines fawn...
DeLillo has examined the impact of the media in nearly all of his work. But the numerous reviews that have pegged Valparaiso as a simple excoriation of media culture are missing what's really happening...
Peeling away the layers of mediahype, we come to the core of Valparaiso: a story about a man who, having a meaningless life with a largely negative impact on those around him turns to the media in an attempt at salvation. His wife, not strong enough to effect change for herself, jumps on board. Michael Majeski uses the media just as much as the media uses...