A funny kind of energy ripples through a crowd as Wallace Shawn saunters through, as he did on March 9 at Greenwich House Theater. It wasn’t an immersive show, but Shawn, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, entered with the audience and chatted with random people as he made his way to the stage. The evening’s production of his one-man show, The Fever, had not yet begun, but the play was first performed in friends’ living rooms, and Shawn tends toward intimacy in some of his live performances. When he mounted the stage, he addressed the entire audience with small talk — the temperature, the microphone, the trouble with cell phones in the theater — and then stepped from chatter into monologue. We hushed. Having made us comfortable guests in his home, he gave us the signal to focus.
Wallace Shawn has two plays currently being performed in Manhattan, off-Broadway: his new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days, directed by André Gregory and costarring fellow Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member John Early, and his 1990 one-man show The Fever. the latter, which contains distinctly Marxist themes, was performed in January by Shawn as a fundraiser for New York City DSA’s Tax the Rich campaign.
Shawn is today best known for his acting roles. He played the comical villain Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987) and more recently the eccentric nerd Dr John Sturgis on the TV show Young Sheldon (2017–2024). His inimitable voice, which can leap mid-sentence from serious and gravelly into an excited falsetto, is probably instantly recognizable to you. But theater aficionados might also be familiar with Shawn the playwright and his sixty years of experience in avant-garde theater and collaborations with Gregory, an experimental director. If you are part of the organized left, you might be familiar with Wallace Shawn the socialist and advocate for Palestinians. Eldest child of New Yorker editor William Shawn and partner to the short story author Deborah Eisenberg,…
Auteur: Annie Levin
