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Pedro Gonçalves

The Fever - Wallace Shawn - Theater - Review - New York Times - 0 views

theater.nytimes.com/...30feve.html

A Febre Wallace Shawn

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 15 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Mr. Shawn has amusingly chosen to acknowledge this paradox in the new production that opened last night at the Acorn Theater, directed by Scott Elliott for the New Group. The evening begins with a Champagne reception (Pommery, no less) held on the stage a half-hour before showtime. Mr. Shawn can be seen mingling with hoi polloi, the dome of his bald head bobbing genially as he exchanges chitchat with audience members. (At the reviewed performance, not-so-hoi polloi gathering onstage included the novelist William Kennedy, the playwright Tina Howe and the actor Ethan Hawke.)
  • The Fever” offers an intimate tour of the tortured consciousness of an angst-ridden, well-to-do American, but Mr. Shawn’s real goal is to hold an unflattering mirror up to his well-meaning, liberally inclined audience. It’s sort of like Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” with you, dear viewer, cast in the distasteful role of Kurtz.
  • Mr. Shawn’s literary models are more likely Kafka and Dostoyevsky, and at its best, “The Fever” does achieve the hypnotic force of those explorers of the uncanny.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Mr. Shawn exposes the contradictions and compromises of the urban liberal mind with a mercilessness that is sly and at times hilarious.
  • Despite the density and richness of its language, however, “The Fever” doesn’t go very deep in its analysis of the fundamental causes of the world’s inequities or posit any rational ideas about how they could be eased. Mr. Shawn is limited by the scope of the narrator’s experience, of course — an economist or political scientist he is not — but the resulting narrative circles around a few basic conclusions that seem thinner and more obvious the more they are illustrated or simply repeated.
  • “My feeling in my heart a sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor,” our narrator unsurprisingly says toward the play’s conclusion. At least Mr. Shawn displays a self-knowledge to match his narrator’s when he has him continue, “And artists who create works of art that inspire sympathy and good values don’t change the life of the poor.”
  • Its simple finger-pointing at the egoism and materialism of the complacent bourgeoisie seems reductive.
  • More to the point, I think Mr. Shawn overestimates his audience’s taste for self-flagellation by a good half-hour. “The Fever” would cut deeper into the consciousness if it were shorter. He 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. And perhaps — who knows? — a few audience members might put that half-hour to better use, studying or working for gradual improvements in the lives of others rather than lamenting their own egoism over glasses of Champagne.
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