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Arts & Entertainment Preview - February 1999 B Y   N A N C Y   D A L V A   &   J O H N   I S T E L What's in a Name?     The Day Room Theater history is strewn with the literary wreckage left by fine writers who've become enthralled with the stage. Read a play by Voltaire or Henry James -- it's a peculiar form of mind-torture. However, don't approach Don DeLillo's Valparaiso, showing this month at American Repertory Theatre, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with trepidation. Not only is DeLillo one of our most acclaimed novelists (White Noise, Libra, Underworld), but his debut play, The Day Room (1986), also produced by ART, revealed an incipient theatricalist. The characters in that dark comedy, set inside a hospital room (or is it a lunatic asylum?), shift roles until it's not clear who's the doctor and who's the patient. DeLillo toys with similar Pirandellian complexities in Valparaiso, an exploration of media-mad America. Michael Majeski, a businessman, flies off to the eponymous Indiana town but somehow ends up in Valparaiso, Florida, and then in Valparaiso, Chile. Suddenly he's the hit of the talk- show circuit. According to DeLillo, "The man is making the most modern journey possible, . . . into the secret places of identity and transcendence." He must choose between "his sanity and his celebrity." Moreover, the production has a secret weapon: Will Patton. One of the theater's most mesmerizing performers, Patton has been lost in Hollywood, appearing in films that don't do justice to his quirky, mad-gleam, slow-boil intensity. Now that theater has reclaimed him -- and hijacked DeLillo -- don't lose your way to Valparaiso. --J.I. Open House Death of a Salesman    The most memorable set design in twentieth-century American theater? Many critics would nominate Jo Mielziner's hauntingBrooklyn house into which Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman lugged his sample cases exactly half a century ago this month in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, directed by Elia Kazan. Its split levels -- the realistic kitchen below an expressionistic skeleton of roof beams -- symbolized Loman's psychic dislocation, a split between his rose-colored past and his precarious present. No matter where the play led Loman -- to his office, to a restaurant, or to the graveyard -- his home loomed overhead. Just as every actor playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan and Mielziner's previous Broadway triumph) must exorcise Brando's ghost, every designer must confront what Kazan called "the single most critically important contribution" to Salesman's first production. With this month's Broadway revival, largely imported from Chicago's Goodman Theatre, Mielziner's triumph will be tested by Mark Wendland. Those who've seen his work -- Timon of Athens, The Dybbuk -- understand how Wendland's designs function as another character. They move, mutate, implode. In collaboration with the director Robert Falls, Wendland has not so much deconstructed Loman's elemental American home as dissected and redefined Mielziner's initial impulse. With the actor Brian Dennehy "riding on a smile and a shoeshine," and fellow cast members Elizabeth Franz and Kevin Anderson adding strong support, the production promises to be the Salesman for the next century. --J.I. If the Shoe Fits     Pacific Northwest Ballet     performs Cinderella Just in time for Valentine's Day, Pacific Northwest Ballet stages its opulent production of Cinderella, uniting the choreography of its own artistic director, Kent Stowell, with the quite fabulous design talents of Tony Straiges (sets) and Martin Pakledinaz (costumes). Neither is a stranger to ballet or fairy tales or onstage romance: Straiges's credits include Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park With George, and designs for American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet; Pakledinaz, a regular designer for the Seattle Opera, has been a successful collaborator with the dance visionary Mark Morris. Thus PNB sets the stage for the perfect Valentine's Day: getting dressed up, listening to lavishly romantic music (score by Prokofiev), and seeing a complicated and deeply satisfying story: wimpy dad, nasty siblings, horrid step-mother, nothing nice to wear, everything awful to do -- the whole Freudian panoply of actual and imagined childhood injustices. Stowell's version of the story introduces a dream element of Cinderella's happy life with her real mother. His Cinderella loses an embroidered pointe shoe on the palace steps at midnight. How perfect! A ballerina's slipper is every bit as much a means of magic as an enchanted crystal evening shoe, and ever so much more available. A ballerina's slipper is a symbol of desire, work, dream, and flight, and bears the marks of the wearer's striving. Therein lies the modern moral of Cinderella. As every woman knows, shoes have power. Some of us are born knowing this, and some of us learn it, perhaps at the ballet. Even if you have no use for princes and castles, you need shoes. And, as Cinderella discovers, the girl with the right shoe gets the best life. (Seattle Center Opera House, February 4-7, 10-14, 206-292-2787.) --N.D Nancy Dalva is the author of Dance Ink: Photographs. John Istel is a senior editor at Stagebill. Go to ... Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.