Wallace Shawn Brings ‘The Fever’ Back To New York

In an interview published last March in Current Affairs magazine, Wallace Shawn, the playwright, actor, and essayist, was asked about the undeniably horrific situation in Gaza. Mr. Shawn, who is Jewish by birth, opined that Israelis were “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did. And in some ways, it’s worse because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret.”Only a passing reference was made to the massacre that precipitated the war, whose perpetrators made little secret of their evil in videos and phone calls. Mr. Shawn acknowledged the “horrible attack on October 7”—his interviewer, podcaster Katie Halper, did not—but he quickly added, “It’s a little absurd to pretend that that came out of nowhere.”These remarks got some attention, as you might imagine, and they seem freshly relevant a year later, as “The Fever,” the socio-political polemic that earned Mr. Shawn an Obie Award 35 years ago, returns to New York. In the play’s last high-profile production here, Lili Taylor played the sole character, an American traveler jolted out of seemingly upper-middle-class complacency after visiting a foreign country where things aren’t so rosy.The new off-Broadway staging, now running in repertory with a new play by Mr. Shawn, “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” at Greenwich House Theater, casts the author as the unsettled tourist. My hunch is that Gaza and other international and domestic affairs figured into Mr. Shawn’s decision to, at 82, revisit “Fever” as a performer — no minor task, as it requires him to deliver what’s essentially a two-hour monologue, if only on Sunday and Monday evenings.The play ran roughly 90 minutes when Ms. Taylor delivered it, but Mr. Shawn’s approach is rather more languorous, at least initially. On opening night, he sidled onstage carrying several layers of clothing—“My preference is to be warm, but not too warm,” he explained, and proceeded to kibitz, charmingly, with the audience for several minutes before launching into the play.Riccardo Hernández’s minimal scenic design provides Mr. Shawn with a chair and a small table, where a thick folder is placed. “Let’s be frank, this is my script,” he quipped that evening. “You can see I’m a grownup — an older man.” But he didn’t reference it once, and offered a razor-sharp, consistently compelling performance.The play itself remains a searing indictment of inequality and our collective imperviousness to it, from which Mr. Shawn does not exempt himself. His traveler finds himself in a hotel room in a country clearly ruled by a brutal regime, hallucinating about giant bugs and guards who beat him and, worse still, challenge his image of himself as a fundamentally decent person.By the end, the character —the playwright, essentially— has resolved, “A decent person cannot be a person who’s gotten away with something,” and that he, by sheer luck, is guilty of the latter. “The moment I was born, a piece of fertile land was given to me, a piece of land from which rich fruit could be plucked by eager hands,” he says. “And I was taught to be very eager,” whereas others, beggars and chambermaids, for instance, were not.There are, however, gradations of wealth and privilege. The field given to Mr. Shawn, whose father was highly revered and no doubt well-compensated as editor of The New Yorker for 35 years, was more fertile than that granted to most of his fans, but less voluptuous, another word used here, than that bequeathed to, say, David Ellison, whose own dad appointed him chairman and CEO of the increasingly powerful Paramount empire.“Fever” doesn’t, like today’s social justice warriors, explicitly use factors like race and gender to divide the world into the oppressed and their oppressors. But it does suggest that historical and economic forces have relegated us just as neatly into haves and have-nots—categories that seem even more simplistic today than they did when the play first arrived. People with the means to enjoy good coffee and wine are, by Mr. Shawn’s logic, no less responsible for the plight of the destitute than billionaires who hide their assets in tax shelters.Since “Fever” basically identifies poverty as the source of everything bad, this has substantial implications. “Each crime of the mugger, each vicious act of the terrorist, contains information — a story about people’s lives,” Mr. Shawn argues. (An older script I found online, notably, did not contain the word “terrorist”; a press representative for this production confirmed the author had made some tweaks.)Early in the play, the tourist describes, in graphic detail, an act of capital punishment taking place back home. Towards the end, he revisits this event after offering a caustically ironic lecture to the poor. “The one they’re being executed for,” he tells the audience, “is you.”You don’t have to agree with Mr. Shawn’s politics to admire his skills as a rhetorician, or his sheer dexterity as both a writer and an actor. But more than three decades on, “The Fever,” however entertaining, seems a little black and white.

Wallace Shawn Brings ‘The Fever’ Back To New York

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