Wallace Shawn

Writer and actor Wallace Shawn's probing, honest, and self-critical take on civilization and its discontents.

Night Thoughts

Collects the author's essays on a number of topics, including world politics, theater, sex, and the writing process.

Essays

THE STORY: The nameless narrator of this blistering monologue lies ill and alone in a dreary hotel room in a poverty-stricken country. A political execution is about to take place beneath his window. Far from the glib comforts of his own life, he s

The Fever

"Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking." TONI MORRISON "Endlessly curious, playful, and subtle." PANKAJ MISHRA SLEEPING AMONG SHEEP UNDER A STARRY SKY is a collection of essays written over the course of the last thirty-five years. Shawn seems to start from the premise that the world ought to be a place where all of us can lie around on cushions writing letters and love poems to each other on multi-coloured paper, as perhaps the women and men of the eleventh-century Heian court in Japan were able to do. Why do we not inhabit a world in which beauty, sensuality, and the adoration of other people, other beings, and the natural world are our principal preoccupations? Why, instead, are we obsessed with a joyless struggle for supremacy over each other? Why have we invented races and nations? Is what we call "civilization" the precipitating cause of our destructiveness and viciousness, our sadism, our love of murder? Shawn himself grew up as a child of privilege and has devoted his life to aesthetic pursuits and hedonism. Has the life he's led provided him with any sort of valuable vantage point from which to view the world, or has he simply been a parasite? As he himself feels that the answer isn't clear, a certain self-questioning underlies these essays, along with a nagging doubt about whether we're right to insist that all of our different qualities and aspects cohere into a single "self." If the self is simply an illusion, how can we understand "ourselves"? And if we don't understand ourselves, what conclusions should we draw from that?

Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky

Aunt Dan & Lemon takes us into the world of a young recluse named Lemon (alias Leonora) who spends her nights reading chronicles of Nazi atrocities. Lemon tells the audience about the overwhelming influence in her life of her parents' friend "Aunt Dan," an eccentric, passionate professor whose stories and seductive opinions enthrall Lemon from the time she is a young girl. The relationship that develops between Lemon and Aunt Dan and the conversations that went on in a small house on the bottom of an English garden form the focus of this play about political orientation and the allure of certain ideas-even if they lead to murder. A forceful play exposing the banality of society's evil, Aunt Dan & Lemon explores the ease with which good and bad become reconciled in the human mind.

A Play

Aunt Dan and Lemon

A playwright and a director discuss the theater and the reasons the director, Andre Gregory, dropped out for three years

My Dinner with Andre

Portrays the strange relationship that develops between a reclusive young woman and an eccentric professor

"Wallace Shawn is up to his old tricks again: pricking the conscience of right-on, left-leaning theatergoers. No one does that better than this impish, idiosyncratic polymath, who, at seventy-two, still comes across as precocious—probably because we resent him flagging our complacent complicity in all the world's ills."—Variety "The play stops, but has no ending. It is for us to try to answer its bleak questions, to see what it might mean to be undeluded."—The Guardian Gathering around a table at the Talk House, an old haunt, a group of friends and theatre artists reunite after ten years to reminisce and catch-up on each other's lives. At first, the conversation is fairly run-of-the-mill: current TV shows and where their careers have taken them. Eventually, the discussion's tone takes a turn when they mention supplementing their incomes through the government-led program to enlist unemployed artists for drone strikes and carrying out violent attacks on foreign land. As is typical of Shawn's plays, the premise at once amuses and unsettles, forcing the viewer to wonder whether being too idle makes all of us complicit in the world's ongoing destruction. Wallace Shawn is a noted actor and writer. His often politically-charged and controversial plays include The Fever, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Marie and Bruce, and The Designated Mourner. With Andre´ Gregory, he co-wrote My Dinner with Andre´, in which he also starred. He adapted the classic Ibsen play A Master Builder for film.

Evening at the Talk House (TCG Edition)

The Designated Mourner

A collection of “deceptively simple, profoundly thoughtful, fiercely honest” essays on art, life, and politics by the acclaimed actor and playwright (Howard Zinn, author of Political Awakenings and Indispensable Zinn). Whether writing about the genesis of his plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon; discussing how the privileged world of arts and letters takes for granted the people who serve our food and deliver our mail; describing his upbringing in the sheltered world of Manhattan’s cultural elite; or engaging in a fascinating interview with Noam Chomsky, Wallace Shawn has a unique ability to step back from the appearance of things to explore their deeper social meanings. In these essays, Shawn grasps the unpleasant contradictions of modern life and challenges us to look at our own behavior in a more honest light. He also finds the pathos in the political and personal challenges of everyday life. With the same sharp wit and remarkable attention to detail that he brings to his critically acclaimed plays, Shawn invites us to look at the world with new eyes, the better to understand—and change it. “Full of what you might call conversation starters: tricky propositions about morality . . . politics, privilege, runaway nationalist fantasies, collective guilt, and art as a force for change (or not) . . . It’s a treat to hear him speak his curious mind.” —O Magazine “Lovely, hilarious and seriously thought provoking, I enjoyed it tremendously.” —Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

This “acerbic yet compassionate” meditation on humanity by the acclaimed actor and playwright offers “curiosity, thoughtfulness, sharp logic, deep emotion” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Beloved actor and Obie Award–winning playwright Wallace Shawn has been an incisive commentator on civilization and its discontents for decades. Now, having recently passed the age of seventy and watched Donald Trump claim the presidency, he offers a late-stage critique of his species, which he sees as being divided between the lucky and the unlucky. In Night Thoughts, Shawn takes the lucky—himself included—to task for their complacency while offering fascinating reflections on “civilization, morality, Beethoven, 11th-century Japanese court poetry, and his hopes for a better world, among other topics” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Two early plays by the noted writer and actor Wallace Shawn.

Two Plays

Our Late Night and A Thought in Three Parts

Chevy Chase

Stephen Kessler

Beverly D'Angelo

Ethan Embry

Wayne Newton

Viva Las Vegas - Hoppla, wir kommen!

Final Edition is a one-issue-only political magazine written by people who are aesthetes and literary writers and edited by Wallace Shawn, who seriously believes that part of our national problem is that the people who run the country have a crude and minimal imaginative life and are too little acquainted with the quartets of Beethoven. The issue consists of five pieces: "Before the Election—Fragments from a Diary 2004" by Wallace Shawn The diarist broods on the analogy between the addiction to pornography and nationalistic obsessions, and he wonders whether a collection of people who vote in a kind of sleepwalking ignorance can ever be called a democracy. "Invitation to a Degraded World" by Jonathan Schell In this essay, Schell meditates on the comic book/disaster movie view of life, in which bin Laden and George Bush are both immersed, and discusses the "standing army" stationed in all of our homes, the media. "The Webern Variations" by Mark Strand Strand’s hauntingly delicious poem explores what is most poignantly beautiful, while exploring the themes of darkness, descent, decline, and nothingness. Wallace Shawn Interviews Noam Chomsky For those with no acquaintance with Chomsky, this could make a wonderful introduction, while offering surprising insights to those who know him well. Chomsky is electric with vitality, wit, and rage as he ranges ferociously across the present and ancient worlds, giving his thoughts on the development of the internet, the 2004 election, and the God of the Bible. In an odd way, the interview highlights the inspirational and optimistic quality of this enormously angry man. "The Twilight of the Superheroes" by Deborah Eisenberg In this brooding, passionate, and brilliant short story, Deborah Eisenberg paints a brutally honest portrait of New York City today and of our lives today, wherever we live. Through observing the lives of some sophisticated residents of the great metropolis, we encounter truths which are both poetic and deeply political.

Final Edition

Kept awake by illness, a traveler considers the contradiction of his life of privilege and the suffering found in the country he is visiting

A major work in the writings of Wallace Shawn.

Grasses of a Thousand Colors is a poetic epic that tells the story of a scientist (Ben), his wife (Cerise), and his two mistresses (Robin and Rose), as they fend for their lives in a world much like ours, yet one savagely close to extinction. Due to the scientific manipulation of the world's crops, a destructive system for which Ben is partly responsible, there is very little nourishment left to be had, except for those most privileged and connected. Despite the dying off of most of the world, these characters manage to survive, at times tasting the good life, admiring the beauties of nature, feasting on animalistic sex, and finding love. The play raises issues of redemption, forgiveness, and responsibility as it recounts a somewhat passionate, erotic adventure story.

Grasses of a Thousand Colors

Shawn's most outlandish work to date, this disturbing and anomalously beautiful play explores the role of human beings in nature and the role of nature in human beings, sexuality being, as Shawn says, "nature's most obvious footprint in the human soul." The play's central character is a doctor who figures out how to rejigger the metabolism of animals. This discovery has unexpected consequences. The play tells a story about the doctor, his wife, and his lovers that is also a story about the planet we live on.

Wallace Shawn

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