Eminentoes/Master Shawn
Marin, Rick
EMINENTOES MASTER SHAWN by Rick Marin W ally Shawn is working the room. The Fever, a monologue by the well-known actor, playwright, and short-bald-guy-about-town, is about to begin at the tiny...
...Forgive me...
...But to get back to The Fever and the big moral-political issues that the rest of us are too bourgeois or craven to notice.' Shawn's narrator has a dream: It is Christmas...
...For months he simply took it around to people's living rooms for the benefit of small groups of friends and admirers...
...Certainly, I expected a sensual stimulant when I found the second bargain matinee sold out and had to squeeze into the early evening show...
...Natasha Richardson wasn't pretty enough, Rupert Everett was too pretty, the photography, costumes, and sets by James Bowman were too slick and self-indulgent, and the Pinterian dialogue appealed, as always, to the audience's sense of abstraction rather than empathy—something which is, of course, as fatal to your artistic aphrodisiac as it is to any other kind...
...In the 1990s Shawn prefers to imagine what it would be like to have dinner at a poor person's house: the "sticky smell," TV always on, tasteless decor, greasy meat, children "sneezing and coughing...
...But old cars, hats, and stockings that tie with ribbons were not enough to make these people seem innocent again...
...Except when he's taking himself seriously...
...I'm deeply moved by this public display of affectation, as it allows me to spend more time eyeballing the woman's companion, who happens to be sitting across the aisle from me...
...The Fever, a monologue by the well-known actor, playwright, and short-bald-guy-about-town, is about to begin at the tiny Second Stage on Manhattan's Upper West Side...
...It is set in Venice and all the clothes are by Giorgio Armani, so it is plausibly billed as an erotic adventure...
...Then, just as my friend was planning a line of attack, there was Wally Shawn...
...Duck-hunting boots...
...An all-the-way decent one would, I suppose, be a contradiction in terms...
...I happen to be on the list of short, bald character actors," Shawn told Interview magazine...
...But the erotic art-house picture of yesteryear, in which the characters were at least close to believable and sex scenes excited the imagination without an excess of gynecological detail to kill it, seems to have gone the way of ballroom dancing...
...He himself is beaten, and he vomits a great deal...
...It has almost no justification...
...His careful rereading of the vast store of original documents presents Rousseau beautifully in the round, and leaves him just as extraordinary as ever...
...Once again, I was disappointed...
...That there is still an audience for someone who can get the balance right appears from the interest that has been aroused, at least initially, in a string of recent films...
...By adoring parents, adoring friends...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 Some might say the Shawn-examined life is not worth listening to...
...He tells of visiting a "revolutionary country," probably Nicaragua...
...H as Wally Shawn appointed him- self the Leonard Bernstein of the 1990s...
...comes to his aid and he cries, sobbing at them: " 'I'm sorry,' I said, 'I cannot give you any more presents...
...The conceit of the piece is that this narrator is in a hotel room in a poor, evidently Latin American country...
...John Weightman, The Sunday Independent Cloth $32.50 Illus...
...Execution...
...Afterwards he can go out on the town with Griffin Dunne, Carey Lowell, and that other woman who kissed him before the show...
...Whose house is this, Bob Cratchit's...
...Long skirt of brown crushed velvet...
...In the 1960s Bernstein threw a party for the Black Panthers and at least met them...
...University of Chicago Press At bookstores or for VISA/MC orders call: 1-800-621-2736 In Illinois: 312-568-1550 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 33...
...In the dream he wakes up in bed "frightened and sweating," then goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth...
...He thinks about these things, his wonderful life and . . . he vomits...
...Maybe they'll even give him a little present...
...Miss Winger's sexual awakening in the arms of a swarthy and polygamous camel driver was too conveniently primitivist to be remotely believable...
...But when Wally Shawn flagellates himself, it's the audience that suffers...
...Shawn's condescension towards the "poor," a category encompassing everyone who doesn't attend the theater regularly and can't afford to shop at Balducci's, is matched only by his intense fear of becoming one of them...
...Here is no yuppie pepper-upper, though it is made to look like one by recombining elements of the recent representativesof the genre—the decadence of Henry and June, the exoticism of Sheltering Sky, and the artistic pretension of Cook, Thief Wife, Lover...
...THE TALKIES LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME...
...Hence the Guilt, as he pleads towards the end of The Fever,"Forgive me...
...What he would say it's about is the fact that anyone who eats a nice dinner at Le Cirque or buys gourmet groceries at Balducci's is a "murderer," because there are starving peasants and Marxist revolutionaries in poor Latin American 'His previous play, you'll remember, was the acclaimed Aunt Dan and Lemon—about how Henry Kissinger was a Nazi and the root of all evil...
...I accepted that a long time ago...
...I suddenly grasp that I've been coveting Dunne's wife: Carey Lowell, the modelactress-Bond girl from License to Kill...
...Bad things are happening there...
...Let's review the bio...
...How right he was...
...There are many soldiers but they look like "shepherds in Renaissance paintings...
...Again and again...
...How charming...
...All of these films, which I went to see in previews or on opening day, were packed with eager, mostly middle-aged people, many of them in couples, looking to refire their jaded imaginations with fresh images of the magic of sexual discovery...
...What is The Fever about...
...Shawn is at the door, nodding hello to patrons who have paid $10 to see him perform...
...Attended the Dalton and Putney Schools...
...The family 'Farrar, Straus & Giroux has published the text of The Fever in 67 wide-margined, large-type pages at a mere $20 per hardcover and $8.95 paper...
...The harsh, expensive one drops actor Tom Conti's name, also that of "Rosanna" (Arquette, let's guess), and informs everyone within earshot that "Griffin" will be coming later...
...She and Shawn embrace and graze each other's cheeks with society kisses...
...He has a wife and children (which Shawn does not...
...He doesn't do it because that would make him, well, poor...
...The people gathered here tonight will forgive him...
...Then he starts pressing the flesh, especially the famous flesh of people he knows...
...Kafkaesque water bugs in the hotel bathroom...
...Exquisite features...
...This country is not charming...
...Then all of them (except the man in the cardboard box) can take a cab to a "fancy restaurant...
...Anita Brookner, The Observer "[Cranston] achieves the miracle of dealing with Rousseau calmly and judiciously...
...Rick Marin is television critic for the Washington Times...
...The latest appeal to the cloyed carnality of an audience in whose company I am so often surprised to fmd myself was Paul Schrader's Comfort of Strangers, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter based on a novel by Ian McEwan...
...There the soldiers wear "strange expressions...
...A Shawn syllogism: "If food is produced for the hungry children, then certain operas will not be performed...
...He thinks about giving beggars and bums not just some but all of his money...
...Self-deprecation is his big thing...
...a harsh, expensive-looking woman in horn-rims shouts at this smiling, pallid gnome...
...I, Wally, am a murderer" is the gist of the argument, and so, by extension, are all of you who lead lives similar to, if not quite so glamorous as, mine...
...What a waste of Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren...
...He describes a scene at a "fancy restaurant" where "women in bright red lipstick" and "men in beautiful shirts" shower him with "outrageous, unexpected, and funny gifts...
...Greenaway anticipated the achievement of Bret Easton Ellis in making the most appalling sorts of behavior boring...
...I love you all but I don't want to give you any more presents.' " Shawn lets us know that he has been given very nice, wonderful presents all his life...
...He told the Village Voice: "I'm very pretentious...
...You look great...
...He stays at an "eccentric, expensive" hotel where he is served delicious ice cream...
...This is the high point of the evening...
...This is a misrepresentation...
...Then, earlier this year, The Sheltering Sky, by Bertolucci, tried a different sort of exoticism and decadence by whisking Debra Winger and John Malkovich off to North Africa where, after Malkovich expired horribly from typhus (or was it cholera...
...Hey, it's snowing...
...I consider myself an idiot...
...And, to his credit, he seems to have turned his court-jester routine into what less sensitive males might call a chick-magnet...
...Born, New York City, 1943...
...Brutal torture...
...And quite indecent ones—i.e., straightforward pornography—are similarly self-subversive: their grossness overwhelms their capacity for titillation...
...There she was—arms crossed, coolly clicking one heel on the pavement...
...They're his friends...
...Cropped red hair...
...A friend of mine who lives near Shawn once spotted a long, luscious blonde waiting at a neighborhood corner...
...Not just ordinary vomit, mind you, but real, existential, Sartrean nausk...
...That these films did not fare especially well at the box office suggests that a lot of people shared my disappointment in them...
...Maybe even certain monologues on the Upper West Side...
...Designer vomit, if you will...
...Another Shawn epigram: "The life I lead is irredeemably corrupt...
...Anthony Burgess, The Independent MAURICE CRANSTON The Noble Savage JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU • 1754-1762 "What this second volume so excellently does is to extend our knowledge of Rousseau as a thinker, even a logician, while dealing impassively with those impulses which weakened the generally heroic cast of his thought...
...Basically, Wally Shawn sits on a chair and recounts the pleasant life and violent fantasies of a character very like himself...
...The erotic scenes were so bizarrely contrived for symbolic purposes that they repelled rather than invited imaginative self-identification of audience with characters...
...That would be Griffin Dunne—actor, producer, and (like Wally) son of a famous person...
...countries who are being "tortured" and "murdered" by U.S.-backed regimes...
...Oxford...
...I'm inclined to agree...
...Impressive...
...In reality, she would have been too busy killing lice to have enjoyed anything more sensual than a hot bath...
...W by can't anyone make a halfway decent erotic movie anymore...
...It is directed by Andre Gregory—later co-author and co-star with Shawn in the most pretentious movie of all time, My Dinner with Andre...
...You look healthy...
...Henry and June at least had no ideological axe to grind and tried to make use of period detail (1930s Paris) to recapture the exciteJames Bowman, TAS 's movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...First there was Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, whose title promised a soap opera-like complexity of relationships but which was, in fact, just an excuse for a tract on how power pathology and sex pathology feed into one another...
...Son of William Shawn, for decades editor and spiritual guru of the New Yorker, Wallace "Wally" Shawn has written several plays' and acted in several movies, going back to his bit in Annie Hall, as Diane Keaton's ex, the one Woody Allen calls a "homunculus...
...Outside the theater he can give money to a person living in a cardboard box...
...How many children, Shawn must have wondered, will go hungry at those prices...
...Various movie roles: Woody's Manhattan and Radio Days, a cunning prosecutor in The Bedroom Window, and, yes, an actual gnome in The Princess Bride...
...His water glass falls on the floor, shattering...
...Then he travels to a neighboring poor country that sounds a lot like El Salvador...
...Yet the movie-makers keep trying...
...An orgy of self-flagellation," Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times of The Fever's opening last December...
...Harvard...
...What follows is an hour and a half of whining liberal guilt and elitist moralizing from a privileged Manhattanite who's just noticed the silver spoon protruding from his mouth—and is embarrassed by it...
...He is, in short, famous—and famous for being short...
...And: "I am a ludicrous person...
...Cherubic, irrepressibly enthusiastic: he's funny at being funny-looking...
...In 1974, his first play, Our Late Night, is performed...
...In the 1960s, taught English, Latin, and Drama in India and Manhattan...
...The image of Wally Shawn enacting his solipsistic manifesto for a salon of New York socialites and "intellectuals" sounds like a scene out of Moliere...
...NOW IN PAPERBACK Jean-Jacques The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1754 $17.95 Illus...
...Read: the unexamined life is not worth living...
...Not even...
...He slips, cuts himself on the shards of glass and "blood fills the floor...
...It is a more intelligent film than Cook, Thief etc., which deals with very "A great work of scholarship which goes down as smoothly as an oyster...
...ment of novelty in a series of sexual adventures that look pretty tame by the standards of more recent art...
...I know you forgive me...
...Their green uniforms look like "pajamas...
...He and the woman embraced and they walked off together, his arm around the waist of this Venus at least a head taller than him...
...Perhaps out of consideration for the less fortunate, Shawn had not originally intended to perform The Fever for money...
...The icecream there, he says, is not good...
...Watching this on the blue-movie channel in your hotel room would be like turning on the gondola races...
...But he always makes sure we understand how profoundly justified his pretentiousness is: "I rather boringly try to think through the details of my life as if it mattered...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
