Kirjahaku

'There is a quality in Shawn's writing - imaginative verve, quiet intensity, a sort of puritan sensitivity or a blend of them all.' The Times This first collection of Wallace Shawn's work contains plays from the seventies and eighties, including Aunt Dan and Lemon, described by Frank Rich in the New York Times as 'the most stimulating, not to mention demanding, American play to emerge this year'. Aunt Dan and Lemon 'A mordant comedy for those who really listen in the theatre... A playwright of astonishing originality and veracity.' New York Times Marie and Bruce 'A play that sees, hears, smells and tells more about the way we really live now than any American play in years... Wallace Shawn is a true original, one of the most deeply seeing, sharply writing playwrights we have.' Newsweek The Fever 'A profoundly engaging and provocative journey through the awakening of a pampered man's conscience.' Newsday A Thought in Three Parts 'Wallace Shawn's highly acclaimed play is a trio of playlets exploring the theme of sexual isolation, each in a very different dramatic style which still retains the author's quite distinctive ability to combine colloquialisms with highly poetic writing in a quirky, sinister way... nasty, hilarious and quite riveting for all the right reasons.' Time Out

A traveller falls ill in a poor country and plummets into a feverish self-examination.But something's been hidden from me, too. Something - a part of myself - has been hidden from me, and I think it's the part that's there on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw out the window of a passing train. The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life - my behaviour, my actions - now that's a slim little paperback, and I've never read it.The Fever was first performed by the author in an apartment near Seventh Avenue in New York City in January 1990. It was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991, and at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1997. The Fever was revived at the Royal Court Theatre in April 2009.

At Ted's instigation, the old gang gather once more at the almost legendary club The Talk House. Ten years on and presided over still by the kindly Nellie, there's the same genteel atmosphere, familiar drinks, unchanging special snacks. But the era of Walter Barclay is long gone.A playwright, a composer, an actress.The possibility of a pleasant night.Evening at The Talk House by Wallace Shawn premiered at the National Theatre, London, in November 2015.

And so yes, well, I'd simply dropped that whole idea of being a good person, I'd dropped it right down into some hole in the street, and down it had gone into the city's sewers, and no one ever saw it again. And that was sad, if you thought it was sad, or I suppose it was sad, or some people probably would say it was sad. As an acclaimed writer finds himself drawn towards a hedonistic lifestyle, his neglect of his wife and son reveals his moral turpitude. Wallace Shawn's first new play in ten plays, another viciously witty indictment of the liberal intelligentsia and its hidden depravity, will be staged in rep with a revival of The Fever at an Off-Broadway theatre in January 2026.

"Wallace Shawn is up to his old tricks again: pricking the conscience of right-on, left-leaning theatergoers. No one does that better than this impish, idiosyncratic polymath, who, at seventy-two, still comes across as precocious--probably because we resent him flagging our complacent complicity in all the world's ills."--Variety"The play stops, but has no ending. It is for us to try to answer its bleak questions, to see what it might mean to be undeluded."--The GuardianGathering around a table at the Talk House, an old haunt, a group of friends and theatre artists reunite after ten years to reminisce and catch-up on each other's lives. At first, the conversation is fairly run-of-the-mill: current TV shows and where their careers have taken them. Eventually, the discussion's tone takes a turn when they mention supplementing their incomes through the government-led program to enlist unemployed artists for drone strikes and carrying out violent attacks on foreign land. As is typical of Shawn's plays, the premise at once amuses and unsettles, forcing the viewer to wonder whether being too idle makes all of us complicit in the world's ongoing destruction.Wallace Shawn is a noted actor and writer. His often politically-charged and controversial plays include The Fever, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Marie and Bruce, and The Designated Mourner. With Andre Gregory, he co-wrote My Dinner with Andre, in which he also starred. He adapted the classic Ibsen play A Master Builder for film.

With his distinctive brand of humour and insight, acclaimed playwright and beloved actor Wallace Shawn takes his readers on a revelatory journey through high art, war, culture, politics and privilege with his first non-fiction collection, which received immense critical acclaim when published in hardback in 2009. The personal and the political become one. Shawn often focuses on contradictions, even when unpleasant, and finds humour in the political and personal challenges of everyday life.

In a gloomy hotel room, after reading compulsively about murders, Shawn tries to sleep but is troubled by meandering thoughts and memories that follow one another in an apparently random chain. Ultimately a point of view begins to emerge. In a world dominated by privileged killers, how should we live? What world do we want? Having recently passed the age of seventy, before which he found it difficult to piece together more than a few fragments of understanding, Shawn would like to pass on anything he's learned before death or dementia close down the brief window available to him, but he may not be ready yet.

“Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking.” TONI MORRISON "Endlessly curious, playful, and subtle." PANKAJ MISHRA SLEEPING AMONG SHEEP UNDER A STARRY SKY is a collection of essays written over the course of the last thirty-five years. Shawn seems to start from the premise that the world ought to be a place where all of us can lie around on cushions writing letters and love poems to each other on multi-coloured paper, as perhaps the women and men of the eleventh-century Heian court in Japan were able to do. Why do we not inhabit a world in which beauty, sensuality, and the adoration of other people, other beings, and the natural world are our principal preoccupations? Why, instead, are we obsessed with a joyless struggle for supremacy over each other? Why have we invented races and nations? Is what we call “civilization” the precipitating cause of our destructiveness and viciousness, our sadism, our love of murder? Shawn himself grew up as a child of privilege and has devoted his life to aesthetic pursuits and hedonism. Has the life he’s led provided him with any sort of valuable vantage point from which to view the world, or has he simply been a parasite? As he himself feels that the answer isn’t clear, a certain self-questioning underlies these essays, along with a nagging doubt about whether we’re right to insist that all of our different qualities and aspects cohere into a single “self.” If the self is simply an illusion, how can we understand “ourselves”? And if we don’t understand ourselves, what conclusions should we draw from that?

Dogs eat dogs. Cats play with mice. A semi-mythological examination of nature, animals, men, and women. Strange dinners, strange parties - sources of death and life. Wallace Shawn's play Grasses of a Thousand Colours was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May 2009.