The play opens in a hospital; the characters are patients, doctors and nurses. It is a recognizable, predictable world. And yet, as the scenes unfold - in dialogue crackling with intelligence and insight, with incandescent bite and humour - our sense of normalcy is rocked from under us. Are these doctors and nurses really just patients from the Arno Klein Psychiatric Wing? Or are they something else entirely: people who are playing psychiatric patients playing doctors and nurses? And who, exactly, is Arno Klein?

Described by the Boston Globe on its first performance as `an unselfconscious, fizzing, inventive black comedy that is enormously funny', The Day Room displays Don DeLillo's extraordinary talents in the brightest of lights.