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Pedro Gonçalves

A life in theatre: Wallace Shawn, American playwright and actor | Culture | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...nterview-wallace-shawn-theatre

Wallace Shawn Theater

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 28 Mar 11 - Cached
  • Speaking of an earlier piece, A Thought in Three Parts, David Hare says that its central section, which dramatises an orgy, "is the only successful piece of pornography in the modern theatre" - stage directions call for 19 orgasms to be shared among four characters - "and it's also sexy and very funny.
  • In Hare's view, Shawn is America's leading contemporary dramatist. "Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever and The Designated Mourner - these are the three major American plays of our time."
  • "When we did Our Late Night at the Public Theatre in New York in 1975, people booed." It was the first professional performance of one of his plays. "One night, they started mooing, like cows. People talked during the play, expressing their sense that it was worthless trash." Joseph Papp, the artistic director of the Public, called him "a dangerous writer. A very rare species. He tells people things about themselves that they don't want to know."
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  • Invited to consider the suggestion that the audience might have recoiled from the play's content, which includes descriptions of masturbation, paedophilia and sex with an "enormous woman" who lets out "elephant moans", he responds cheerfully: "Ah, but I thought it was well written! When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman's films."
  • In the mid-1980s, the sexual vaudeville of Shawn's early work gave way to political concerns, though the dramatic procedure was the same: just as the lust-filled reveries that occupy a person's private thoughts remain hidden from the world at large, so, in the second act of Shawn's playwriting career, the obscene oppression of the world's poor by rich and powerful nations is covered up by hypocrisy and, if necessary, military force
  • The original production of 1990 was described by Frank Rich, then the resident theatre critic of the New York Times, as "nothing if not a musty, radical chic stunt destined to be parodied". A revival in 2007 prompted the headline in the same paper, "The World's a Mess, and It's All Your Fault". Rich deployed the weapon that is used frequently in attacks on Shawn's plays, calling The Fever "an almost entirely humourless assault on the privileged class by one of its card-carrying members".
  • Shawn, who was educated at private schools before going to Harvard and Oxford, posits a defence based on sincerity. "Being in poor countries was something that changed me more than anything else." He wrote The Fever after visits to Central American states where ruthless dictatorships relied on backing from the US government. "It gave me an insight into the sickness of my own society." The epiphany gave him permission "to devote my life to being a writer". He has an engaging belief in the transforming power of literature.
  • In Hare's view, the reconstruction of Shawn as a political playwright happened as a result of his exposure to British theatre. "Wally came to Britain in the 1970s, and fell under the influence of Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill and myself. Until then, the main tendency of his work had been surrealist."
  • When A Thought in Three Parts, which incorporates the comic youth hostel orgy, was mounted by Joint Stock at the ICA in 1977, it led to protests from members of parliament and a demand on the part of the Conservative MP for Staffordshire South West for "urgent talks with the Arts Council". There exists a theatrical legend that the play was banned; the reality, though less sensational, is equally dismal. Threatened with the loss of its grant, as Hare recalls, the ICA "decided not to extend the scheduled run, despite sold-out houses".
  • A note at the head of The Fever says that it was "first performed in various apartments in New York City". The performer was the author. It has since been played in many countries, by actors of both genders.
  • "The trouble with theatres is that people are sitting in seats that they have sat in before, to watch other plays. They are settling in for a certain type of experience, bringing with them a lot of preconceptions that start filtering into their brains before the play has even begun." In spaces such as an abandoned men's club building, where The Designated Mourner received its first and only New York staging, "the audience doesn't know what to expect, and is perhaps more willing to meet you halfway."
  • "I have lived in the shadow of my father. It would be ridiculous to pretend that there is no relationship between the sex in my plays and the reticence about sex which my father practised, even carrying it over to his duties as magazine editor. It's almost too obvious to mention. Clearly, I must be in some sort of reaction to that, although" - he does the comic deadpan - "I've taken it awfully far."
  • Grasses of a Thousand Colours is like Shawn's early plays, in being domestic drama of an outlandish kind. Animals don fancy costumes and welcome humans to a party. Cats make satisfying lovers. Husband and wife take pleasure in savaging one another, just as they do in other works by Shawn. Donkeys stand on the table at dinner and "haphazardly piss", while men admire their penises. "Of course it has upsetting elements," Shawn says, looking as if, as was once said, the strongest four-letter word he could utter is "Gosh". He insists that writing "is not a voluntary process.
  • Isn't all writing to some extent about trying to get through the layers of propaganda and false interpretations and received ideas and clichés that prevent us from seeing what's going on? I think that's the enterprise."
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.)
  • 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.
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  • Mr. Shawn exposes the contradictions and compromises of the urban liberal mind with a mercilessness that is sly and at times hilarious.
  • 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.
  • “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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