Category Archives: Wallace Shawn

Next season at the Public Theater

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The Public Theater on Lafayette Street.

The Public Theater on Lafayette Street.

Ah, youth. In 1978, at the green age of 16, I first visited the Public Theater on Lafayette Street on a short weekend trip from my home of Hazleton, PA, for a day of theatregoing that could easily bruise the sensibilities of a callow youth. In the afternoon, I enjoyed Robert Woodruff’s staging of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class; after a dinner break, I returned for Thomas Babe’s A Prayer for My Daughter (a play ripe for revival here in New York; it had a London revival in 2008).

Those were the glory years for Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival; A Chorus Line was providing a fresh infusion of cash into the Public’s coffers, and it was a rare night on which any of the Public’s (five stages? six?) performance spaces were dark. I returned several times over the next twenty years or so, but I never found the same electricity as I did that March day in 1978. Papp died in 1991, and by then the Chorus Line cash cow wasn’t delivering quite as much milk. During the tenures of JoAnne Akalaitis and George C. Wolfe as subsequent artistic directors, the Public fell into something of an aesthetic and business funk — then, indeed, there were many days and weeks during which all of the Public’s stages were dark.

As a tyro playwright, even in those days, I duly submitted my plays — dreadful imitations of Brecht and Pinter — to the Public’s literary office, which still accepted over-the-transom manuscripts, and after no more than a month always received rejection letters (though sometimes with an encouraging handwritten note asking to see my next play, a sheer godsend for a teenager smitten with the theatre). The Public liked playwrights back then. Legend has it that when Joseph Papp discovered that Wallace Shawn had to work in a copy shop just to make ends meet, he offered Shawn the same amount of salary just to permit Shawn to spend his days writing plays instead. These days, this would constitute a revolutionary commitment to the “emerging playwright”; in those days, it was just good sense and a favor from an artistic director to an artist. (And it paid off, as you’ll see below; on one of my subsequent visits to the Public, I saw Shawn perform The Fever.)

Over the past few years, the Public, under Oskar Eustis‘ artistic direction, has been generating a little more of that electricity — and yesterday’s announcement of the Public’s 2013-2014 season exemplifies the energy. The Public will be co-producing the US premiere of Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors in the fall (and a revival of his best play to date, The Designated Mourner, this summer); also this fall, the Public is bringing in the Foundry Theatre’s new production of Good Person of Szechwan, directed by Lear deBessonet and starring Taylor Mac, which first opened at La MaMa earlier this year. There’s also Arguendo, a new performance from Elevator Repair Service; four “Apple family” plays by Richard Nelson in rotating repertory; new plays from Suzan-Lori Parks and the Civilians; a new production of Antony and Cleopatra; and 29(!) monologues from Mike Daisey.

It is, even by the standards of the grotesque hype and Facebook blubbering that accompanies these season announcements, a tempting menu, even for a confirmed skeptic like myself — and maybe one that will bring Ron Rosenbaum down to Lafayette Street again. More information here.

Drama of new consciousness

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I’ve spent some of this weekend thinking about what draws me as an artist, critic, writer, and unabashed enthusiast — not to mention as all of these wrapped up, along with everything else, into what we might call “my person” — to the plays of three very disparate English-language dramatists: Richard Foreman (b. 1937), Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), and Howard Barker (b.1946). Readers of Superfluities Redux will be aware that I’ve written about all three at some length, and at first glance the work of all three writers seems to share little in common. The unique idiosyncrasies of approach, language, and form of each of these writers forestalls extended comparison, either with each other or with the work of other playwrights of the period. I’m not entirely sure that if you put all three of them in a room together, they’d even have much to talk about, and might even regard each other with some suspicion and ambivalence.

But there may be more linking these dramatists than first meets the eye. It is no coincidence, I think, that all three first emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Foreman’s first Ontological-Hysteric play, Angelface, premiered in 1968, and Barker’s professional debut, Cheek, came only two years later. Our Late Night, written in the early 1970s, opened at the Public Theater in 1975. All three writers matured in the political, cultural, and sexual storms of this most chaotic and revolutionary period, and their work reflects a confrontation and negotiation with these storms; they also matured as theatre was turning from traditional dramatic texts to explore more experiential strategies in the forms of performance art developed by a variety of practitioners.

So much can be said for so many playwrights, but Foreman, Shawn, and Barker share more than this. Foreman and Barker, of course, saw the need to form and lead their own companies apart from the institutions of both commercial and non-commercial theatre for a continuing exploration of their very individual projects, and Shawn has similarly devoted a great deal of his professional career working outside the confines of mainstream theatre. But beneath this there is more, I think. I gingerly describe a few strains of similarity below.

The theatres of all three dramatists are text-based; their plays first originate in the generation of a text for the stage created by an individual author. The three dramatists in question accept the primacy of written and spoken language as the driving force of the theatrical experience. Similarly, their approach to language is lyrical, rather than dramatic, epic, or narrative: it is an approach that suggests a vertical rather than horizontal approach to the confrontation with language, an absorption in the individual moment of experience rather than a story. Language creates character; characters do not “speak” their own language, and notions of subtext take a subservient role to the explicit sound and surface of language itself.

The theatres of all three dramatists employ strategies of post-Brechtian estrangement — literally, a “making strange.” Foreman’s description of his plays as a series of “unbalancing acts” and Barker’s notion of a “theatre of catastrophe” indicate an impatience with, and repudiation of, accepted norms of theatrical and dramatic experience: an effort to undermine the preconceptions of both theatre and culture with which audience members enter their theatres. Similarly, Shawn’s plays confront his audiences with a series of shocking, disturbing images and linguistic structures that aim to unsettle the audience’s sense of a predictable and comforting self.

The theatres of all three dramatists suggest all-encompassing landscapes of experience largely divorced from realism and naturalism. While none of these dramatists have written what might be called “site-specific work” — plays written for performance in a particular non-traditional space — they nonetheless situate their plays in scenic environments that challenge norms of narrative drama. Both Foreman and Barker direct and design their own productions, generating unique landscapes and soundscapes for the presentation of their texts; and while Shawn does neither, his work has been staged in a variety of non-theatrical environments, including individual apartments and disused gentlemen’s clubs, for example. They are more interested in providing theatrical and dramatic environments for exploration rather than telling stories or preaching to the converted.

The theatres of all three dramatists center in a contemplation of eroticism and death. If these three dramatists explore the extremes of experience, they do so through presenting the fragility and the ecstatic potential of the human body. All three dramatists press against the confines of cultural taboo and transgression, and they do so through the most intimate physical and spiritual of the body’s potentials, sexuality itself.

The theatres of all three dramatists aim to explode conventional notions of consciousness in an effort to free the individual spectator to think for himself, providing the promise of change and rebirth, rather than as a collective — they are politically, socially, and culturally anti-ideological. Taken together, the above characteristics represent a challenge to culturally conventional ways of thinking about experience, and ways of experiencing thought. They do not seek to teach or explain; they do not seek to provide catharsis; they do not seek to tell a story (though they still seek to amuse and entertain in the most profound definitions of these words; if anything else, they are showmen). Instead, they intend to provide a theatrical experience that undermines convention and provokes new ways of seeing, new forms of consciousness that are more inclusive of the world’s possibilities and impossibilities than traditional theatrical and dramatic forms. They are, in this sense, radically open works that repudiate closure. While they do not exclude or dismiss the necessity of living within a collective, they place emphasis on the individual consciousness and the ways this consciousness impinges on the definition of collectivity itself. Additionally, the plays of these three dramatists undermine and parody Cartesian definitions of existence that would divide consciousness into thinking, feeling, or spiritual experience. The dramatists encourage thinking with the body, feeling with the intellect, recognizing the spiritual in the material, the quotidian in the noumenal, and so on.

Foreman, Shawn, and Barker, then, each in their own idiosyncratic ways, provide examples of the revolutionary potentials for the 21st century drama, theatre, and culture: revolutions of perception and consciousness that, in the wake of the disastrous social and cultural revolutions of the 20th century, may provide new promise for experience and redemption. I do not find it mere coincidence that these writers came of age in the chaotic but uniquely promising 1960s, nor that their work became increasingly complex and confrontational as the 20th century progressed towards its technocratic, postcapitalist, electronic and digital end: their projects of dramatic and theatrical revolution always were conceived in confrontation with and in opposition to these impulses.

It is not necessary to fit them into aesthetic or critical boxes or definitions to recognize certain interesting similarities. But tracing these threads allows us to see the broader implications of their work for the theatrical and dramatic art of the 21st century, and hope for a renaissance of theatrical and dramatic sensibility in a culture which increasingly seems to be hostile to it.

Review: The Fever

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Simona Maicanescu in Wallace Shawn's The Fever.

Simona Maicanescu in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever.

UPDATE: For a chance to hear another early Wallace Shawn play, New Dramatists is offering a reading of Our Late Night (1975) on Monday, 28 January, at 7.00pm, followed by a conversation with “the legendary” Shawn and Francine Volpe. More information here.

The Fever by Wallace Shawn. Directed by Lars Norén; adaptation by Norén and Simona Maicanescu; lighting by Jean Poisson; costume by Chatoon; sound by Sophie Buisson; artistic collaboration with Nelly Bonnafous and Bob Meyer. With Simona Maicanescu as the Traveler. At La MaMa ETC, First Floor Theatre, 74 East 4th Street, 24 January–3 February 2013. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. Tickets here. Reviewed at the 24 January performance. More about the play here.

For nearly all of The Fever‘s hour-and-a-half running time, Simona Maicanescu is confined standing in a small chalk-white box drawn on the floor, stage center, all of her body’s energy funnelled through her constantly moving and disciplined hands and face. They become a bodied representation of the cultural delirium charted in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever: expressions of fear, rage, and finally self-loathing, ultimately energy that has nowhere to go except outward to the audience. Once the audience absorbs that caustic energy — well, what then?

It’s a good question; the play itself provides no answer and, to its credit, neither does Lars Norén‘s production, which opened at La MaMa ETC last night and runs through 3 February. Premiered in 1990, performed by Shawn himself first in private apartments and then at the Public Theater, The Fever had a peculiar reception from New York Times critics. “[It's] nothing if not a musty radical-chic stunt destined to be parodied: a brave, sincere and almost entirely humorless assault on the privileged class by one of its card-carrying members,” wrote Frank Rich in 1990; about Shawn’s performance at a 2007 New Group revival of the play, Charles Isherwood smugly and dismissively wrote, “[Shawn] should know that a 90-minute monologue gives too much rein for straying thoughts about dinner plans and how best to catch a taxi after the performance” — something about the play brings out the obtuseness of Times critics, apparently. I note this only because performances of The Fever by actors and actresses other than its writer permit a clearer assessment of the play’s literary and dramatic achievements. (I describe the play in further detail here, where you can find a description of its narrative and structure.)

For this production, Maicanescu and Norén have trimmed the play somewhat, adding to its effectiveness (though the text concludes quite differently from that of the published version), and Maicanescu is a fascinating figure, constantly tense and coiled though wrapped in a fetching and elegant little black dress by costumer Chatoon. Her performance is possessed of a strange childlike innocence, underscoring the hypocrisy of the Traveler’s social position and alleviating somewhat the self-conscious irony inherent in the monologue form itself.

And, as I note above, it is a particularly bodied performance, appropriate to the many references to body in the text of the play: Jean Poisson’s lighting design traps Maicanescu in a variety of confinements: as her awareness of the poor is raised through the first half of the play, a second chalk-white square appears around the first in which the actress stands through the production, a broadening of consciousness; in the final third of the play, a gobo throws the shadow of prison bars across Maicanescu, trapping her in an awareness of her own responsibility for the world. It is otherwise a simple production (though, compared to Shawn’s own spare presentation at the Public in 1990, its scenic elements are as lush as any Franco Zeffirelli opera), elemental and sufficient.

On the other hand — and I would be dishonest if I did not admit my reservations about the play, apart from its very fine text, production, and performance here — I have a nagging feeling that, at the play’s conclusion, we are left with an affirmation of the social and economic determinism that the play itself seems to castigate. Like Mike Daisey’s monologues about globalization, The Fever is the presentation of the emergence of political awareness in American upper-middle-class consumers; it is a consciousness-raising work. But once that consciousness is raised, what is it precisely are we supposed to do with it? Obviously that’s up to us — but, given the United States 25 years after The Fever‘s premiere, the condition of political discourse in America, and the continuing poverty of the world, I wonder if that’s enough. It’s true that art does not provide political solutions — but this is a rationalization as well as a truth (as many rationalizations are, which The Fever admits).

Still, on a cold winter night, The Fever may leave you colder, not at all a bad thing. There is no reason to miss it; tickets are available here.

Reading Wallace Shawn’s The Fever

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Wallace Shawn performs The Fever in 2007.

Wallace Shawn performs The Fever in 2007.

The Fever by Wallace Shawn. “First performed, by the author, in January 1990 in an apartment near Seventh Avenue in New York City,” according to the published version of the play; first professional performance on 17 November 1990 at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. Text: New York: Grove Press, 2004. A new production of The Fever opens on 24 January 2013 at La MaMa ETC. (Two videos from the play appear at the end of this post.)

A human being happens to be an unprotected little wriggling creature, a little raw creature without a shell or a hide or even any fur, just thrown out onto the earth like an eye that’s been pulled from its socket, like a shucked oyster that’s trying to crawl along the ground. We need to build our own shells … (45)

Wallace Shawn is the Arnold Schoenberg of contemporary American dramatists. Rigorous, disciplined, and uncompromising, his plays abandon the formal rules of 19th and 20th century American drama, finding passages of lyricism and sensuality that arise from a context of severe dissonance of perception. The long spans of time that separate Shawn’s individual plays belie the highly-wrought, densely-structured aesthetic and cultural perspective from which his drama emerges.

Nowhere is this more evident than in The Fever, his most challenging and uncompromising work to date and perhaps, not to spin the comparison too thinly, Shawn’s Erwartung; after nearly 25 years it continues to appeal to performers, directors, and audiences, testimony to its continuing aesthetic and political challenges as well as its rewards. A journey through an individual’s physiological and political delirium, The Fever attempts to delineate the birth of a new metaphysical consciousness tied to the political realities of the 20th-century West. All of Shawn’s plays appear to take place in dreamscapes; The Fever is set in an individual blood-spattered nightmare of anxiety and guilt.

A narrator (called “The Traveler” in some productions of the play, including the 2004 film starring Vanessa Redgrave, but unidentified in the original text) finds himself sick and vomiting in a poor country in the early-morning hours. The narration is framed, though, by the Traveler’s awareness of an execution taking place in his own country that same morning: “And so now they come — they come for the man who lies on his cot, the cat-like man whose face is so large, so black, that the guards who open his cell are once again frightened, shaken.” (3) From here the delirium radiates outward, tracing the Traveler’s own status as a member of the cultured class in the first world as that status is undermined by his experiences among the third-world’s poor. He finds himself making several journeys overseas to these countries, without quite knowing why. A terrifying series of images from the Traveler’s childhood, his recent past, and his imagination lead him slowly to a recognition of his own culture’s dependence on the world’s tortured poor, progressing from a theoretical understanding of Marx and commodity fetishism to a far more bodied and sensual awareness of this class. Eventually his delirium ends:

Now the bathroom floor, the candle, flickering. I lift it, I stand up, I walk out of the bathroom.

Now I’m back in the bedroom, leaning against the wall. Put the candle down on a little table. A breeze comes from the open window. I draw a chair to the window and sit.

In the street, far away, a man cries out. The earth relaxes. The prisoner in the electric chair has suffered and died, and the guards have taken him out to his grave. And yes — there — there’s a wash of blue on the dark wall of the sky, a hint of dawn. (62)

But the end of the Traveler’s delirium promises no resolution to his anxiety — only an awareness of the condition of the world’s poor, which he will take back to the comfortable home with him and that he cannot escape.

Next week, home.

What will be home? My own bed. My night table. And on the table — what? On the table — what? — blood — death — a fragment of bone — a fragment — a piece — of a human brain — a severed hand. — Let everything filthy, everything vile, sit by my bed, where once I had my lamp and clock, books, letters, presents for my birthday, and left over from the presents bright-colored ribbons. Forgive me. Forgive me. I know you forgive me. I’m still falling. (67)

The dissonant repetitions, interruptions, and melodic line of this finale underscore the aesthetic debt that the play owes to Schoenberg; the presence of Shawn’s idiosyncratic lyricism infuses the play structurally in passages about the Traveler’s boyhood and his experience of city landscapes. While this conclusion notoriously provides no resolution to the anxiety produced by watching the play — it does not tell the audience, or the performer, what to do next — that is not the dramatist’s business. A playwright may find the fields of morality and ethics fertile sources for his inspiration, but he is not ultimately responsible for providing an instruction manual for fixing the world, a project that has proven beyond the greatest minds in human history, after all.

The Fever presents, in addition, a variety of themes with which Shawn has been obsessed since his early plays and recur again in his work after The Fever, not the least of which is the role of physical and sensual sensation and how these sensations color the perception of the world outside of us and how we relate to that world and the other individuals in it. He is first introduced to Karl Marx by an acquaintance at a nude beach, and first reads Das Kapital “naked in bed” (19); the Traveler is rendered susceptible to the suffering of the poor by recognizing his own biological identity with other suffering individuals, his clothes shed and his skin unprotected. Shawn reserves his most caustic satire for his depiction of the consumers of high culture in New York. [1]  In the following passage, he emphasizes the inadequacy of Chekhovian realism as usually produced in the elitist American theatre, [2] and perhaps the most prevalent form of contemporary American drama, to his own growing political consciousness:

I went to a play with a group of friends — a legendary actress in a great role. We stared at the stage. Moment after moment the character’s downfall crept closer. Her childhood home would at last be sold, her beloved cherry trees chopped down. Under the bright lights, the actress showed anger, bravado, the stage rang with her youthful laughter, which expressed self-deception. She would be forced to live in an apartment in Paris, not on the estate she’d formerly owned. A man whose father had once worked there as a serf would now buy the estate. It was her old brother’s sympathetic grief that finally coaxed tears from the large man in the heavy coat who sat beside me. But my problem was that somehow, suddenly, I was not myself. I was disconcerted. Why, exactly, were we supposed to be weeping? This person would no longer own the estate she’d once owned … She would have to live in an apartment instead … I couldn’t remember why I was supposed to be weeping.

Riding in a taxi home from the play, my friends were critical of one of the actors. His performance had been slack, inadequate, not thought through. If the character he played behaved in such a fashion in the First Act, his later actions could not be explained. I stared, frozen, out the taxi window. (26-27)

The high culture which the Traveler professes to love, and the beauty it represents, have become commodities themselves, the treasure of the leisure class and no one else; it has, itself, become fetishized. “You see, I like Beethoven,” he explains. “I like to hear the bow of the violin cut into the string. I like to follow the phrase of the violin as it goes on and on, like a deep-rooted orgasm squeezed out into a rope of sound.” (10) The concept of beauty, removed from the concert hall and into the street, however, becomes far more dangerous, far less benign. “Your love of beauty could actually kill you,” he later says, discussing the “seductive, luminous” beauty he finds in the face of a beggar. (38)

The Fever is also Shawn’s most meta-theatrical play to date, though among his work it is the play that seems to translate most readily into other media, including a sound recording and a television film. The monologue itself was originally designed for presentation in small spaces or apartments, before audiences of only ten or twenty individuals. Though it’s been performed by a variety of actors and actresses, Shawn’s performance of the monologue, in both its original 1990 productions and its 2007 revival at the New Group, exploits Shawn’s own minor celebrity as a likable character actor in films like Manhattan and The Princess Bride, playing upon the anxious nature of celebrity in the Culture Industry and the exploitation which supports the dissemination of the products of that industry.

The play is a densely-patterned work, themes and images (such as an imaginary book of the Traveler’s life) recurring again and again, each time within different contexts and pointed towards a variety of aesthetic and political ends — a highly-wrought object which can’t escape its own fetishization, as the Traveler cannot escape his own status and condition. It remains, however, a work of astonishing beauty — a beauty, perhaps, that could kill you. [3]

Below, Simona Maicanescu performs The Fever in an excerpt from the upcoming La MaMa ETC production of the play:

And below, Wallace Shawn himself reads from the play in 1999:

Footnotes
  1. Though as in all of Shawn’s work there’s a vein of humor that runs through the play, this humor is not a relief but underscores the suffering of those whom the Traveler visits. It is not one of those “serious” American plays of which, like many, it could be said, “And of course it’s very funny” — a construction and concept which may be the “I was only following orders” of contemporary American drama. [↩]
  2. Though it must be emphasized that Shawn is drawn to both Chekhov and Ibsen at least as a performer, famously in Vanya on 42nd Street and more recently in his current work with Andre Gregory on The Master Builder, though at least the first is far from a naturalistic production of Uncle Vanya. [↩]
  3. There is more on The Fever — including a brief, grimly amusing history of the critical obtuseness which greeted the play upon its professional premiere in 1990 — in W.D. King’s book on Shawn and his plays, Writing Wrongs. [↩]

Upcoming: The Fever

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Simona Maicanescu in Wallace Shawn's The Fever.

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.