|
Home > Dramatists > Wallace_Shawn
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
Photo: Tristram Kenton
Wallace Shawn's Grasses of a Thousand Colors, his first new
play (over three hours long, directed by Shawn's long-time
collaborator Andre Gregory) since 1997's The Designated Mourner,
has opened at London's
Royal Court Theatre to reviews more schizophrenic than mixed. In the
Telegraph, Charles Spencer writes that Grasses "is both dirty-minded
and supremely self-indulgent. ... [Long] before the end I felt sated
and sickened by the playwright's pervy and frequently bestial fantasies,
and this 65-year-old man's positively adolescent obsession with
his own penis" (hardly, I suppose, a "money" pullquote), while Aleks Sierz
has been moved to reconsider his initial negative
response to all of Shawn's work. In his review for The Stage, Aleks
calls it "compellingly directed" and "beautifully designed," and Michael
Billington's review of the show in today's Guardian calls
the play "extraordinary" and "[Shawn's] vision of a nightmare future
horribly
plausible" (which should take the edge off Spencer's quotes, though I
doubt that last quote will encourage New York producers to schedule the
show any time soon).
Shawn's plays occupy a distinctly uncomfortable place in American
dramaturgy, largely because of his instinctual drive towards examining
sex, desire and the abject. In his earliest plays, he concentrated
specifically on the human tendency to use sex to subjugate others and the
self in a series of fantasies; then, with Aunt Dan and Lemon, he
married this concentration to a consideration of the sexual and political
roles of power in post-war America (and, for that matter, in
first-world countries around the globe). Rejecting a straightforward
narrative in favor of stream-of-consciousness monologues (which
reached their apotheosis in The Fever), Shawn turned more and more
to an internal examination of the comfortable intellectual class in a
world of suffering and starvation.
"My plays are a response to the world we live in – I mean, I only
say that because it might well seem that they take place on Mars," he
wrote in the introduction to two of his early plays. "I'm stirring up and mixing up
various elements in order to create an artistic object, an object that
exists for the purpose of being contemplated." The themes of this
contemplation are often precise and specific: marriage in Marie and
Bruce; intellectualism, compromise and self-absorption in The
Designated Mourner. And they provoke a complex emotional response. In
Shawn's plays, the experience of recognition engenders not only empathy
and pity, but also a coruscating sense of guilt and shame. ("When I
finally arrived home [from the theatre] at midnight, I couldn't look my
own cat in the eye without blushing," Spencer wrote in the odd sentence,
more disturbing than comic, that concludes his review.) They're also very
much a reaction to the American culture of celebrity, a culture in which
Shawn's own acting work in films like The Princess Bride and
Manhattan has led him to become a minor celebrity of his own: a
readily recognizable comic character actor. Shawn plays with and exploits
this status by appearing in his own disturbing stage work – the
lovable, peculiar little man exhibits tensions and grotesque fantasies
that reach to the heart of sexuality and power. Shawn also exploits
his role as a representative of the moneyed intellectual class, of
left-progressive leanings but seemingly unable to prevent the
horrors that governments perpetrate, presumably on his behalf.
A New York premiere does not appear to be in the offing; though the
Royal Court staging of Grasses of a Thousand Colors is listed as
being "produced in association with" New York's The New Group, the play does not appear on the
company's 2009-2010 schedule announced on Monday. (Indeed, we still wait for an
announcement of a New York production of Chris Shinn's Now or
Later, which premiered at the Royal Court last year.) For those like
David Cote, who apparently loves him some Wallace
Shawn, there remains some good news in the meantime. Film versions of
three of Shawn's plays (Marie and Bruce with Matthew Broderick and
Julianne Moore, The Fever with Vanessa Redgrave, and The Designated Mourner with Mike Nichols and
Miranda Richardson) are available on DVD, and next month Theatre
Communications Group will publish the text of Grasses of a Thousand Colors. Later this
year, Haymarket Books will publish a book of Shawn's essays.
|
|
Superfluities
Redux home page
George Hunka
home page
theatre
minima home page
Theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum
II (2008-2009)
Critique of
Tragedy (2010-continuing)
Notes
Howard Barker
1
Howard
Barker 2
Samuel
Beckett 1
Samuel
Beckett 2
Bertolt
Brecht
Richard
Foreman 1
Richard
Foreman 2
Je Suis
Sang
Sarah
Kane
Music
Marilyn
Nonken
Saint Oedipus
Contact
geh@panix.com
Copyright © 2003-2010
by George
Hunka
|
