Writer Don DeLillo has spent a good deal of his career exploring the apocalypse of the mundane. His protagonists exist in a kind of cultural hell, torn apart by the world around them and unable to cope with the incessant and oppressive onslaught of products, images, and banality. DeLillo's recent bombshell Underworld was something of an anomaly, inasmuch as the author generally restricts himself to shorter tomes rather than 800-page epics. Valparaiso, DeLillo's second play, is by necessity a return to pointed brevity, though he retains his trademark shards of paranoia-drenched dialogue. Valparaiso is an oblique tale of epiphany through accident. A man, Michael Majeski, sets out on some vague business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana, but winds up instead in Valparaiso, Chile. The mishap earns him a good deal of media attention, though his vapid interviewers gradually begin to resemble almost malevolent inquisitors. As the play progresses, Majeski's trip transforms into a simple, if effective, metaphor for midlife crisis and anomie: The confusion of the unknown initially leads him close to suicide, but the experience proves invigorating. Meanwhile, his wife finds his tale to be both a means of renewing the excitement of her marriage and a liberating excuse to change her life. Maybe. DeLillo's introduction of a Greek chorus in Act Two makes the parallels to classic hero quests explicit, with Majeski in search of an antidote to the meaninglessness of everyday existence while his Penelope-like wife patiently waits at home. Of course, the author's unnerving psychological tricks bring about a self-destructive anti-catharsis rather than a tidy conclusion, but that's part of his power: To DeLillo, human beings are just atoms trapped in a tiny, tight molecule, bouncing about and occasionally striking each other until they explode in a messy cloud of inevitability and broken psyches.