IN THE DAY ROOM, hot-shot novelist Don DeLillo turns insanity into a laughing matter. "Nothing original in that," you say, "it's been done hundreds of times since Hamlet." But DeLillo, the paragon of paranoid lit, has packed his literary loonybin with so much intelligence and dramatic punch that madness starts to look like an appealing state of affairs.

The Day Room

Written by Don DeLillo

Originally Directed by Michael Bloom

Restaged by David Wheeler

At the Loeb Drama Center

In repertory until March 22

The play, DeLillo's first, begins serenely enough. In a semi-private hospital room, Budge (Jeremy Geidt) engages in oriental exercises while roommate Wyatt (Thomas Derrah) sits in bed, reading The National Enquirer.

Budge keeps trying to pull Wyatt into a conversation, mostly by enumerating all of the favorable conditions for conversation: loose-fitting clothing, beds, chairs, regulated temperature, and food on the premises. All Wyatt wants is reassuring test results. Too bad, because now the line of visitors commences.

Budge's eccentric meditations appear relatively tame once Grass (John Bottoms) plows into the room, dragging an I.V. stand with bottles pumping fluids into his every orifice. Grass claims to suffer from "heavy water." After some banter about medical exotica like "dangling paraphenalia" and "polyester blood," a nurse comes to take Grass back to the "Day Room" in the psychiatric wing. Then this nurse is taken away as a looney.

The process repeats itself several times, with orderlies rushing in to take way each successive charlatan doctor and nurse. The mysteries pile up as the crazies start to crowd Budge and Wyatt's room. What exactly is this "Day Room"? One nurse describes it as a place "where they watch daytime television and throw food." But is she to be believed? She also states that the Day Room is in the "Arno Klein Memorial Wing," but what and where is that? Is Budge to be trusted? Finally, is Wyatt--Mister Normal--to be trusted?

WITH WIDE-RANGING and incisive comments on death, co-ops, language and television packed in into a General Hospital setting, it's clear that DeLillo has found another metaphor for attacking the metaphysical clutter of modern American life. From the mysterious link between football and nuclear war in End Zone, to the ennui of Star Wars style warfare in "Human Moments in World War III," DeLillo has proved himself to be the modern American master of fear and loathing.

But just when you think you've got DeLillo's intentions pinned down, he'll toss a thematic spitball and twist his meaning 180 degrees. The second act is a cracked mirror image of the first, as cunning and elaborate systems of role-playing and deception are peeled away, audience and cast alike slipping and sliding on the intellectual banana skins littered about the stage.

The scene and characters, but not the cast, are completely different. A group of people gradually gather in a motel room to await the arrival and performance of the Arno Klein Theatre troupe. Lynette (Harriet Harris) and Gary (Nestor Serrano) have driven for 300 miles just to see them. But this is not your usual motel room. It soon becomes clear that this is the mysterious "Day Room," mentioned in the first act. DeLillo is in hot pursuit of as much theatrical symmetry as he can force down the audience's throat.

The A.R.T. regulars put on uniformly excellent performances--they're well accustomed to the meta-theatrical games of The Day Room. Having toured with the show, they have perfected DeLillo's twisted conception of dialogue. Hipster author Jay McInerny, who seems to have royally ripped off DeLillo's Americana in his best-selling Bright Lights, Big City, has pointed out that DeLillo captures speech patterns everyone recognizes but no one writes. His one-liners and brilliant speeches are always a bit skewed--his characters never quite connect with their minds, leading to bizarre propositions like:

"Tell me about yourself. Make it up. Who are you? What do you want? What are your hopes, dreams, fears, ambitions? Use cliches. Tell me something I can believe."

BOTTOMS' PERFORMANCE is perhaps the most riveting and outrageous, as he takes both of his characters, Grass in the first act and the nebbishy Freddy of Act Two, to the edge and beyond. Nevertheless, the play never loses balance because DeLillo has spread out hilarious lines quite evenly among his insane asylum inmates. Derrah and Geidt start off by creating an atmosphere of subdued surrealism that clues us in to the weirdness ahead. As a human television in Act Two, Derrah switches channels effortlessly. Sitting to the side, looking straight ahead, and wrapped in a straitjacket, he transfers his voice with manic precision from soap opera to BBC documentary to laundry commercial.

Theatergoers expecting the Next Big Thing out of DeLillo are bound to be disappointed. He is covering ground blazed by Stoppard, Beckett and Pirandello, but he is covering it well. (Interestingly enough, last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the latter's death, and A.R.T.'s artistic director Robert Brustein designed this season as a sort of tribute to Italy's greatest dead playwright.)

The Day Room was given its world premiere last April in the annual A.R.T./New Stages show, and this is another chance to see it if you missed it then. You'd be crazy to miss it again.