Fevered writing
The LA Times’ theatre critic, Charles McNulty, reviews the new book of essays from my favorite working playwright, Wallace Shawn.
My favorite line:
Shawn’s signature tone, familiar to those who know his one-of-a-kind dramatic works, such as “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” “The Fever” and “The Designated Mourner,” or his movie colloquy with Andre Gregory, “My Dinner With Andre,” is a kind of canny naïveté, in which complicated questions are approached with a simplicity that strips the conventional barnacles from the search for truth.
Yes! That is true. Mix that with free-floating entitled guilt, and you’ve got much of the tone and approach.
What McNulty’s review doesn’t get at, and where Shawn excels in both his plays and his essays, is the net result of this approach: a fresh way of seeing. “Clearing the barnacles” allows one to see the hull, and to sail more speedily. Clearing the detritus, or “camouflage of details” (another sharp observation from McNulty), allows one to see the truth and to act. The Bush Administration was all about obfuscation, with heavy layers of incompetence. Whether or not, from the comfort and safety of his couch, Shawn is taking action, in all his work he nevertheless calls into question basic assumptions about safety and privilege and morality and humanity in ways that are thrilling and not a little jarring.