Smash hit

The Chicago play is Love-Lies-Bleeding, just published over here. It opens at the Steppenwolf Theatre on Thursday, the same day that Valparaiso has its press night (“I guess it’s just as well that they’re about 3,500 miles apart”).

It’s wonderful, mixing the language fixations of the earlier plays with a recognisable, emotional story. A man is in a hospital in a vegetative state: his wife, ex-wife and son gather round to decide what to do about it. It’s a play about euthanasia — but not one that deserves to be labelled an issue drama, “although inevitably it will be responded to in those terms”. Is mortality something he finds himself dwelling on these days? “Yuh,” he shoots back. A Pinteresque pause. We move on.

Since the 800-page Underworld DeLillo has kept things small — the novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Cosmopolis (2003) and the two plays. He’s never spent more than six months on a play, compared with five years for Underworld. “It doesn’t involve the sort of onerous selfpunishment that a novel sometimes involves,” he says. “At least it doesn’t for me — I’m sure that playwrights, real playwrights, may disagree.”

He’ll be in Chicago for the opening of his new play. But he admits that he will always be a novelist first, playwright second. “Love-Lies-Bleeding feels like a very important project. But at the same time I’ve got my head in a novel I’ve been writing for a year now. And it’s very difficult to do both at the same time. The timing is not perfect at all.” So the shenanigans of mounting and promoting the play are a holiday from the novel? “A distraction.”

He’s also been distracted recently by the American release of his first film, Game 6, a screenplay he wrote in the early 1990s. It stars Michael Keaton as a playwright missing his own first night for a baseball game. Was he happy with it? “There’s a wonderful performance by Michael Keaton,” he says.

The film attracted the full gamut of reviews, from very positive to very negative, didn’t it? “I’m not inclined to say very much more.” Writers are famously disrespected in Hollywood — was he able to keep control of his script? “To some degree. Certain things disappear somewhere along the way. The way you might lose your keys during a civil war.”

His novels have often been optioned without any yet reaching the screen. Now, though, it looks as if White Noise is about to be made, with the director of Men in Black, Barry Sonnenfeld. “It has looked that way for quite some time,” suggests DeLillo coolly.

Despite his love of movies, he says that he’s not that concerned whether one of his own books makes it on to the big screen: “It exists in the form in which I conceived it already, and it would seem a little superfluous.” So he likes to keep semi-detached from such sideshows? “Oh, more than semi,” he says, with what sounds suspiciously like a smile. “Seven eighths.”

Valparaiso previews from tomorrow at the Old Red Lion, N1 (020-7837 7816), and opens on Thursday

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