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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.)

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.

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.