SOURCE: “The Hard Subjects,” in Hudson Review, Vol. 52, No. 2, Summer, 1999, pp. 285–88.

In the following excerpt, Loughery pans Valparaiso.

Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso concerns a man who buys a plane ticket to Valparaiso, Indiana, and ends up in Valparaiso, Chile. This mildly amusing idea might have yielded a good light comedy. It is certainly plausible; I recall some years ago a couple intending to go to Panama City, Panama, ending up in Panama City, Florida, just as a hurricane hit, stranding them there for days. This became a running joke in Florida, where the northern Gulf Coast is referred to as “the redneck Riviera.”

Valparaiso, however, is no comedy, but a hyperserious social problem play, focussing on how the hero’s misadventure is treated in the press and on television. Brustein, in a program note, maintains that the play “exposes the media’s ravenous invasion of privacy,” but this...