Here's the copy from the original dust jacket (Knopf 1987):
Don DeLillo--one of America's most highly praised novelists--now gives us his first play: a brilliant black comedy that mixes laughter and terror as it uncovers the dimensions of sanity and identity hidden in each of us.
The setting is, at first, a hospital; the characters are patients, doctors, and nurses. It is a recognizable world, familiar and predictable. And yet, as the play unfolds--in dialogue crackling with intelligence and insight, with incandescent bite and humor--our solid sense of normalcy is rocked out from under us. These doctors and nurses just might be patients from the Arno Klein Psychiatric Wing. Or they might be something else entirely: people who are playing psychiatric patients playing doctors and nurses. How many levels do we have? How well can we hide? And who, exactly, is Arno Klein?
When "The Day Room" premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1986, National Public Radio called it "the spectacular and provocative theatrical debut of one of America's best writers." The Boston Herald hailed it as "an intellectual mystery, a metaphysical comedy, and absurdist riddle." The Boston Globe found it "exhilarating to watch--an unself-conscious, fizzing, inventive black comedy that is enormously funny." And Robert Brustein declared: "Like a Mobius strip "The Day Room" illuminates new planes and dimensions with unexpected twists and turns of action. Although written by a lifelong novelist, it uses entirely theatrical ingredients...A dynamic entertainment that continually regenerates ideas, images and laughter."
"The Day Room" is an electrifying reconfirmation of Don DeLillo's extraordinary talents.