Wallace Shawn
Dinovella, Elizabeth
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Elizabeth DiNovella Wallace Shawn Few American playwrights touch upon the personal responsibility people bear for their government's actions. Wallace Shawn has tackled...
...Q: What's it like to be in such different artistic worlds...
...And I loved being Mr...
...Shawn was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the son of journalist Cecille Lyon Shawn and William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker...
...A citizen of Indonesia is just not responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib...
...They know that's not enough...
...Theater is really the safest of all the forms, except for maybe bingo...
...And I have to explain it to my friends, to the people who are like me, who grew up like me, and dress like me, and look like me...
...What inspired you to write The Fever...
...Maybe I have no self...
...I was quite fond of being the Grand Nagus leader of the Ferengis on Star Trek...
...So you have to ask yourself: Would I have had the guts to do that...
...They were prepared to go more than halfway themselves to meet the performance that was coming at them...
...There were these avant-garde companies, one of which Andre Gregory ran...
...Shawn: Well, that is just a naivet...
...And an American can do quite a bit without even suffering the slightest punishment...
...Maybe I was eight...
...It is astounding that America does work in the same way that an open dictatorship works, in that a handful of people really seem to be able to dominate an entire country...
...They look at you blankly.That's not enough...
...See what you can do...
...So there was a sense of yes, I have to declare what I am, how I am feeling...
...I was just scribbling things in a notebook...
...Shawn debuted on the stage in Gregory's production of Endgame in the early 1970s...
...You'd come home and you'd be too excited...
...He co-wrote the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre with Broadway director Andre Gregory...
...She is just fascinated by it...
...Q: What do you say to Americans who don't necessarily feel personally responsible for government-sanctioned torture, such as the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib...
...I suppose it was the most rapid period of change inside of me that I had experienced really, maybe almost ever...
...The setting was actually daytime but it was night, stars, costumes...
...Some people say Bush is a religious fanatic who believes he is inspired by God...
...If you go to a foreign country, and somebody looks at you frankly and says, "Your country is going around terrorizing the world," and then you say, "Well, I'm against Bush myself...
...The next year, I did quite a different play and people thought I was rather serious, and that was gratifying...
...Probably, you'd look at him with some skepticism, even though a German in Hitler's Germany had to risk torture and execution for even the slightest resistance...
...But Shawn may be better known for his comic performances as an actor...
...There's nothing they could do about it really...
...I couldn't stand it...
...Shawn: It's disturbingly easy to go into different selves...
...He was the squeaky-voiced villain Vizzini in The Princess Bride, the neurotic dinosaur in Toy Story, the lovelorn teacher in Clueless, and Diane Keaton's ex-husband in Woody Allen's Manhattan...
...But then I flipped back...
...Whenever these two dreamy theatricals emerge from the cocoon of their process, it's good news for the American theater," wrote critic John Lahr...
...I thought that what was happening in the room would have a planetary impact...
...I saw the potential of it all...
...That was just a wild rumor that you would hear, that a guy called Bob walked into the room briefly when torture was going on...
...If you had met a German who was living there and he's prospering, and he's not in opposition, and you say to him, "But look, I've heard about the things that are being done there...
...Not to be maudlin, but I have an autistic sister who is very interested in her own right arm...
...Is that the right way...
...If that German just said, "Yes, it's awful, I know, I voted against Hitler, but now what can I do...
...From the beginning, that seemed very attractive...
...Because of the way I was brought up, I still find it hard to believe that people in charge are really not rational," Wally says...
...Today, these words sound like the ravings of a lunatic...
...This is much better than everything else that is going on: the lights, the mysteriousness of it, the vastness of the stage...
...You'd be more excited than a liberal is really supposed to be...
...From sixteen to twenty-two, I was anti-writing...
...Q: You were writing The Fever in the late 1980s, yet everything seems so current now, these issues of torture and citizen culpability...
...Wallace Shawn has tackled this issue and other weighty ones for three decades...
...The character wrestles with knowing that, as a citizen, he benefits from such injustice...
...It was not an attitude of, "Oh, what can you do to entertain me...
...it's just a quirk...
...Jews are being executed...
...Facts come at them and have no effect...
...In many ways, I was very ill at ease in those days, didn't care for it at all...
...I suppose it's some kind of quirk, like any other...
...I began to hate my own kind...
...Q: What's the favorite role you've played...
...Q: When did you start getting interested in writing...
...I don't know if there is any truth in that at all...
...You might say, "Oh, he's being silly because each individual is not responsible for the entirety of what happened at Abu Ghraib...
...on their part, because they haven't thought about it enough...
...The two have collaborated for years...
...That's exactly how we would feel, let's say, in the old Hitler days...
...And then, when I was nine, I did a play in school, and people thought I was funny...
...There's television, gambling, and there's getting drunk...
...Companies thought that what they were doing might change the world, really...
...Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld say the same things after the facts that they said before the facts, so that's kind of crazy...
...It's a strange activity, that need to put words together and look at them and read them...
...I'm not insisting on being nostalgic...
...They wanted to see something that would totally astonish them, and they were prepared to commit...
...They want to be amused...
...People are bored in the evening and they want some kind of diversion before they go to bed...
...Shawn: That's a hard question...
...I was doing a lot of reading...
...They know that you are benefiting every day, you are paying taxes, your money is actually paying for these things, so come on, that's not good enough...
...When I would walk into a perfectly agreeable bourgeois restaurant where a hundred people exactly like myself were innocently having dinner, I would feel an unbelievable sense of horror and rage...
...He was charming and funny during our interview...
...I'm bored and miserable...
...Of course, the actor is professionally flipping back and forth between different selves, which is why I think people are fascinated by actors...
...the people in the hundred-dollar seats sometimes broke into wild applause...
...I just translated The Threepenny Opera of Brecht, and when the characters of the murderer and the thief said, "How can poor muggers like us compete in criminality with the big corporations...
...It was all quite magical...
...But it was quite influential to go there and, particularly, to experience coming home, which was awful...
...At that time, the Americans didn't openly admit to torturing people themselves...
...Is that what I meant...
...Hall, the teacher in Clueless...
...I thought, this is fantastic...
...Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive...
...Because a liberal might be against injustice, but, you know, you shouldn't be hysterical about it...
...That was quite fabulous...
...It was very successful," he says, noting that now most Americans are against the Iraq War...
...I couldn't express all these thoughts at a dinner party...
...Shawn: The early '70s was a very, very exciting time in the theater in New York...
...But nobody in those rooms believed that they were simply providing diversion or killing time for people who had put in a hard day's work and wanted a little distraction...
...Gregory directed Shawn's 1997 play, The Designated Mourner...
...Shawn: I was in a play at school when I was five...
...I was already writing a lot of this stuff that eventually ended up in The Fever before I went there...
...I never enjoyed any experience of acting more than being in Vanya on 42nd Street, although I always hated my particular role...
...Factory label...
...That's how I like to spend my time, and I've done that from an early age...
...Q: What do you think of the leaders of the Bush Administration...
...The dentist who is pulling a tooth is slightly different from the same dentist who is having sex with his wife...
...Citizens of the United States could do much more...
...Your country is a criminal country...
...I was going through a lot of changes...
...He lives in the neighborhood with his longtime partner, the short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg...
...Now is when we should do it," Shawn says...
...But you could do more to try to prevent that...
...I suppose it is an exaggeration of the ordinary person's life because we all to some extent have different selves...
...So, yes, I was into it from very early on...
...Deborah Eisenberg and I made several trips to Central America [in the 1980s...
...But it has to be said, the people did come to the play to be transformed...
...This year, Shawn's own performance of his one-man play The Fever was released as an audio CD by the Shout...
...Shawn: At first I didn't know what I was writing...
...It's very apropos to the Bush days...
...That was gratifying...
...Q: You've been involved with theater from an early age, too...
...Shawn has been marching and speaking out against the Iraq War from the get-go...
...But I don't think Cheney claims to be inspired by God, and yet even when his theories seem to be disproved by facts, he just keeps repeating them...
...I imagine they are still doing this play-I was a shepherd worshipping a young Jesus...
...You should calmly oppose injustice if you are a liberal...
...But my struggle against it added a certain benefit for the film...
...In 2004, he published a one-off anti-war magazine called Final Edition...
...And some of it had earlier roots because I had written another play called Aunt Dan and Lemon, which had definite political themes to it...
...Even though they were prosperous, they were so angry at Bush because he was really trying to help people who are even more prosperous, the top 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent...
...Maybe that's because of my great powers of persuasion," he adds with a grin...
...Writing is something like that...
...But audiences in general are not seeking to be transformed now...
...The play's character realizes his government is committing atrocities abroad in order to maintain its privileges and standing in the world...
...When we went to El Salvador, we met people who had been tortured by the government, which was backed by the Americans...
...Such a phrase would not have been used by anybody...
...Obviously, today people have a realistic view of theater...
...Shawn: I grew up around writers...
...I met Wally on a brisk October afternoon in the West Village...
...You write plays that are very much about the inner life and yet you also do voices for Disney...
...I didn't vote for him...
...But neither his pleasant manner nor his cherubic face could hide his fierce intellect and moral outrage...
...Then I had a period where I turned against the idea...
...Wallace Shawn: I can't pretend to understand them...
...In other words, if they don't think they are responsible, that's factually inaccurate...
...Q: How has theater changed over the decades you've been involved in it...
...It dramatized a crackdown by a new authoritarian regime, and the concomitant cultural shift to escapism...
...I thought people basically were writers unless for some strange reason they weren't...
Vol. 70 • December 2006 • No. 12
