Simona Maicanescu in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever.

UPDATE (8 January 2013): More about The Fever can be found here.

This year will see a mini-festival of Wallace Shawn plays in New York. The main event will be the upcoming Wallace Shawn-André Gregory Project co-produced by the Public Theater and Theatre for a New Audience, but the whole will kick off later this month with the presentation at La MaMa ETC of Shawn’s monologue The Fever, a French production (presented here in English) directed by Lars Norén and performed by Simona Maicanescu. Opening on 24 January and running through 3 February, the play is described at La MaMa’s Web site:

In this new French production of Wallace Shawn’s gripping monologue, an upper-middle-class woman from New York wakes up feverish in the hotel room of a war-torn country. This Candide of our times begins probing the foundations of her privileged life, unable to keep pretending that “coats have no history, but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside.” The humor is quirky, and the questions are unsettling. They are not meant to be answered, but to bring attention to the shocking landscape of social injustice through which most of us walk every day and almost all of us fail to see. Directed by Lars Norén, one of Sweden’s most prominent playwrights, and featuring acclaimed French-Romanian actress Simona Maicanescu, The Fever has been performed to rave reviews in both French and English throughout France, and at international festivals in Sweden, Luxemburg, and Romania. The Fever marks Maicanescu’s first one-woman show and the first time Lars Norén directs a contemporary piece other than his own.

I’ve written on this blog earlier about Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors (which has its US premiere later this year) and his book Essays. The text of The Fever is available at amazon.com. La Mama is located at 74A East 4th Street between Bowery & Second Avenue. More information and reservations at 212.475.7710.