It was something like the summer of 1998, and I was living in a warehouse by the Brooklyn Bridge—living illegally in a warehouse that filled with raw sewage one night—where the landlord cut the sewage access and electricity every so often—and the dry wall we’d put up didn’t reach to the ceiling eighteen feet above—and I never had electricity in my room. When I think of that summer, I always remember the time my roommate claimed that a stream of flame sporadically shot out of his upper arm while working construction earlier that day, and the time I met Wally Shawn while working at the Film Forum.
He’d come in to complain about the line. I remember how I chuckled and shrugged at his incorrigibly irritated self like a person presented with some rom com darling come to life. I couldn’t take him seriously because of the fact of him being him and all that goes along with that, but Wally Shawn should be taken seriously.
He is not just the Sicilian in the Princess Bride. He is not just Woody Allen’s foible in Annie Hall. My Dinner with Andre only scratches the surface of what he is capable of. Uncle Vanya does not do the many talents of Wally Shawn justice, brilliant piece of theater though it may be. These are valid and interesting faces of Mr. Shawn, but the point is that he has more than even these myriad faces, and the more you look for them, the deeper they go.
Specifically, the tragedy of Wallace Shawn is that he was a playwright before he was an actor, and unlike the rest of New York, acting is his day job, and exists only to pay the bills while he toils away at a truly noble pursuit, the penning of plays.
He would have liked to have been given the same respect and place in the canon as Philip Roth, but he has been stifled by his success. He was doomed on the one hand, to forever be branded as the character he plays so well, the hilarious homunculus of the Upper East Side, and doomed on the other by his privileged upbringing as the famed and long-running editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn. His life is the perfect recipe for a tortured artist whiling away in anonymity even when he is at the same time successful, cherished, and loved among a small group of equally out-of-touch bohemians.
It doesn’t help that Wally Shawn came of age during a period when the replacement of theater by other means was almost complete. When playwrights seemed to have fallen in love with the ersatz world of television and movies (Sam Shepard) or at the very least fallen in love with the artificial and heavy-hitting language of the noir and pulp these mass media were born from (David Mamet), but Shawn has always created worlds that come across as intentionally inaccessible to a wider audience. Both in terms of the out-of-touch bohemians he so loves to jibe and satirize and his penchant for including sexual scenes that are somehow both too explicit and too disarmingly sincere for most audiences to accept.
Shawn only became an actor when a director thought it would be funny to put him in a play he was translating from Italian (The Mandrake by Machiavelli), and now, more than thirty years later, he’s still going strong, with roles in shows like Deep Space 9 and Young Sheldon to the more highbrow fair—often in conjunction with longtime friend, Andre Gregory—not to mention the famed Sicilian in Princess Bride. And generally speaking, he is always associated with his acting work because he is such a distinctive character actor, but the plays…
There is a long and respectable tradition of writers and artists being unappreciated in their lifetime, but the attitude today seems almost to be “how quaint of them back then to be unable to see genius when it is in front of them, those foolish and naïve brutes,” when the truth is more that the modern entertainment system, along with the institutionalization of both conceptual art and art in general, has created an atmosphere where genius would be more easily stifled and obscured than at earlier times in history, both because art and creative pursuits are increasingly tied to higher education, which will forever brand and maintain a very narrow understanding of things by its very nature as an institution, but also worth has become increasingly tied to sales. There is no longer this idea of a thing of worth in and of itself regardless of its performance on the marketplace. (Or there is, but invariably it’s tenured professors who gain their legitimacy elsewhere.) By and large, monetary worth has become synonymous with artistic worth. And Wally Shawn’s plays do not speak to a wider audience. They are too subtle and prone to monologues.
In Our Late Night, which won an Obie Award when Andre Gregory directed it in 1975, “She was like a pool of honey, with delicate, scented cries rising to the surface. Her lips were so hot, they almost burned my cheek. She let out scores of powerful, piglike squeals, more piercing than the cries.” And after his accounts of making it with an immensely fat black woman, his own wife, his hand, a field of pine nettles, and a bank of sand, the hero of this wild tale doesn't crow over his stud-like sexual stamina but instead collapses in soul-scraping despair and cries himself to sleep.
These are plays that stew and simmer, and go places that seem incongruous with the Wally Shawn we all know and love.
Wally Shawn—the ivy league intellectual, the one man show, the thinking man’s comedian—is to me the ultimate highbrow post apocalypse playwright because he has been writing a kind of literature of self-loathing for the past forty years and specifically the self-loathing of the intellectual who is waiting to be shot. His plays may read as shocking incriminations of the moral failings of his friends, but they also work as affirmations of the banality of the coming evil, and in this American wasteland of the post-Trump and the ongoing fascist movement that’s become his legacy, Wally Shawn’s plays seem perhaps the most apt envisioning of our world and what it’s like to be someone who both has a deep understanding of John Donne and is stuck living in America in 2021—but also that having a deep understanding of John Donne does not mean you are not disgusting in your soul.
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What has brought me back to Wally Shawn is the release of a couple podcasts last June, specifically of his plays, The Designated Mourner and Grasses of a Thousand Colors. In both the plays, Mr. Shawn himself plays the lead character, which seems appropriate. The plays indeed feel like a pair of particularly gruesome daydreams realized as drama—which is perhaps what they are—and as many intellectuals are wont to do, in them, Wally does not paint the protagonist (himself) in a very attractive light. In fact, in both these dramatic productions, we are encouraged to loathe and despise the Wally Shawn stand-ins, Jack and Ben.
I came of age in the 90’s, in Boston and New York. It was a time when America felt like the undisputed champion, having won the Cold War in the final round, and now everyone was cheering all the time. And in among these cheering faces, were the usual sullen stares of those who believe in nothing—we who shot fireballs and fell through the drop ceilings of the lofts of the world—who sang Blood, Sweat, & Tears in college auditoriums with faces adorned in condiments and wearing nothing but a paper bag loin cloth—who sang in lounge bands and soul bands and dressed in the polyester colors of the past and cut our hair in “invalid chic” or “punk monk” and this culture of performance continued into the new millenium, with “musical night” in a revamped church, full of anarchist musicals, absurdist musicals, the Birthday Musical, and—I kid you not—the Dresden Dolls for their first public performance—and I started putting on plays every eight days in my bedroom, and once—for “all-nite bedroom theater,” which is exactly what it sounds like, we did a reading Wally Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts, which primarily involves an orgy in a hostel, a performance done fully clothed and in the driest of deadpan.
This play, and other Wally Shawn plays, seemed to fit with a larger unacknowledged movement in theater and performance, of Tom Frank and Spalding Gray, a movement like punk in a plaid button-down and tortoise shell glasses or a Woody Allen with a cocaine problem washed up in Thailand.
But Wally Shawn has always stood out as distinct from his theatrical compatriots because of his obscurity and his largely unassuming life. He is not a druggie or a sexpot. His life, as seen separate from his art, is very simple and straightforward. Unlike Spalding Gray for example, whose career as a monologist came to a sudden halt after his last touring show, It’s a Slippery Slope, in which he famously relayed his response when he found out a one-night-stand of his was pregnant. “Get rid of it.” Spoken with all the cruelty as he no doubt originally spoke it, and this time, the audience did not forgive him for his transgressions.
What struck me when listening to these podcasts of Mr. Shawn’s is how well Wally’s writing lends itself to the radio. All that narration works to its benefit. For Wally Shawn, the stage has always been extraneous to the work. He writes plays that are as internalized as novels and should be experienced in the same way.
And really, Wally Shawn is as much a philosopher as a playwright or an actor. “We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that,” Shawn says in his monologue, Why I Call Myself a Socialist. “He knows, in fact, that the role of himself is actually a rather small part, and that when he plays that part he must make an enormous effort to conceal the whole universe of possibilities that exists inside him.”
The plays Shawn writes represent possible realities, dreamworlds flavored in realism, places of a lewd soullessness. Like an actor on his off hours searching for his true self and coming up empty, these plays showcase a depth that reveals the profound emptiness of our cultured selves and our searches for meaning. Or, as the physicist Carlo Rovelli puts it, "We are nothing but images of images. Reality, including ourselves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which … there is nothing.”
No one wants to examine these depths beyond the fragile veil, so Shawn continues to be known primarily for his work as an actor, and his most light-hearted of introspective works, the film, My Dinner With Andre, in which he plays himself going out to dinner with his old friend Andre (played by Andre Gregory) who spends the whole dinner going through the many wild twistings and turnings of his spiritual quest.
It’s amusing, captivating, and surprisingly simple. We, the audience, like Wally, are out at dinner with Andre and listening to his madcap capers and harrowing close calls and all-around plunges into the ultimate questions of existence. It’s a delightful film with a very casual tone but a film that reverberates and continues to have an effect and be meaningful to audiences forty years later.
Andre Gregory went on to direct Wally Shawn in My Uncle Vanya among other theatrical productions—Andre Gregory, known for his work as an experimental director, has himself had his name tied to Shawn’s through the years—and now, appropriately, it was Andre Gregory, almost 90, who directed and produced the aforementioned pair of podcast versions of Wally Shawn plays, The Designated Mourner, and Grasses of a Thousand Colors.
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Between the two, The Designated Mourner is closer to realism. The tone of it, something like some Upper East Side set of bohemian aristocrats living in a world with heavy Latin American overtones, like something by Mario Vargas Llosa but starring extras from a Woody Allen film. (In fact, literally starring extras from a Woody Allen Film.)
As I mentioned before, in the podcast, Shawn himself plays the lead, and I can’t imagine it being played by anyone else. Because, in some sense, that jarring confusion between the public character actor Wally Shawn and the private playwright Wallace Shawn allows for a unique opportunity—for him to play with interiority—that he as the narrator/author both adds weight to the story and also introduces questions that wouldn’t otherwise be there. It gives these tales of fiction (which are as much fairytales as realism) an autobiographical quality. They are experienced as memoirs of Shawn’s imaginary selves, landscapes of several of the nation states that make up the “universe of possibilities” he contains. The critic has turned stuntman on us.
The play revolves around Jack, an outlier in the world of Howard, the respected poet and Jack’s father-in-law. Jack exists as a nagging cynical voice among the aesthetic elites he’s found himself among and describes himself as a “former student of English literature who went downhill from there.” Throughout the play, his tastes are forever angling downwards, from highbrow to lowbrow, and at some point, his dick becomes a character in the proceedings.
New York is full of people like this. Godzilla, one of my roommates at the loft I mentioned at the beginning of this article, had come to New York to study philosophy, and somewhere along the line declared himself a Maoist, who dressed up in a gorilla outfit to harass pedestrians from the loading bay, and brought home a bunch of manikins only to draw things like a house on the crotch region as a witty comment on vaginal politics. There are plenty of indie dramedies based in New York that present a brand of aesthetic elite who feels almost like they’d be eager to be transported to a Mario Vargas Llosa style dictatorship, if only as an anecdote to the ennui, and at some point for every New Yorker dicks do indeed become a character in the proceedings.
Point being, this is a very New York play. The very manner in which Shawn blends his highbrow tone with the increasing crassness of his lead has a very New York flavor to it. Even the “Latin American dictatorship” quality of it feels New York, in the sense that it feels like a New Yorker’s imagining of a Latin American dictatorship. I don’t buy it, but I buy Jack as a person and a character, which again only heightens the sense that this entire play is a peculiar caricature of the universe, but one that’s been peopled by real human beings. Which somehow makes it all the more poignant when their fake world comes crashing down around them.
Whether or not these subtle sleights of hand are intentional or accidents of Shawn’s particular psychology, they are captivating to experience. The Designated Mourner stands as the quintessential turn-of-the-century play. It captures the sense of New York before 9/11, before G W Bush and Trump, the sense of entitlement and dread, and now, here in our burgeoning apocalypse, its prophecies are on the brink of turning true.
It’s a very pointed work with a bitter ending. The only sweetness in this play come from Judy, Jack’s wife, and most spectacularly when she describes the night the soldiers come and take them all away. Except for Jack. He had long before vanished off to some anonymous location in his frustration at Howard and the rest, an exit he performed coincidentally on the very day that Howard was beaten mercilessly out front of his house.
This play is of a type for Shawn. It reminds me most of the Fever, a monologue that he wrote perhaps ten years earlier, which does indeed take place in some anonymous Latin American country, and involves a traveller, the classic liberal who, between reveries of his delicate past and bouts of retching, explores what it means to live in the world and be responsible for your part in it.
It is perhaps my favorite thing he’s ever done if I’m honest. It is so bleak and so uncompromisingly honest. The monologue drifts through the nuances of liberalism and privilege, slipping from commodity fetishism down to the depths of our tribalist sensibilities. There is a reading by Wally Shawn himself available in two parts here and here.
This monologue clearly shows what sets Wally Shawn apart from his contemporaries. Both his uncompromising understanding and unsparing rendition of these truths leads to a theater to make you squirm. Whereas Spalding Gray always first and foremost wanted to entertain the world with his dark humor. Truth was secondary to him.
I would recommend the reader watch Swimming to Cambodia and The Fever back-to-back. In the former, Mr. Gray recounts his adventures taking drugs and having an emotional breakdown while working in Cambodia in a film called The Killing Fields. In the latter, Mr. Shawn is put on trial by his conscience for the elusive crime of being privileged in a world of suffering.
But Wally Shawn also has a penchant for another kind of play. The sort of play like A Thought in Three Parts. Shawn seems to vacillate between morbid explorations of a kind of stylized realism that often have political overtones, like in A Designated Mourner and The Fever, and a more fantastical, epistemological, and sometimes downright scatological vision of things, as in A Thought in Three Parts and Grasses of a Thousand Colors.
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There is a point where, in The Grasses of a Thousand Colors, the narrator describes his sexual exploits with his cat. “’To be known,’ I thought as hot sperm flowed out of me, flowing over her paws as if it would never stop. ‘To be seen and known.’ I was weeping with gratitude.”
For Shawn, sex is both absurd and religious. Again, it’s the incongruity of it that stands out. Like Shawn’s own incongruity in the world of letters, the sex in these plays has a similar incongruity of the polite and intellectual cadences and themes the characters indulge in and their unnerving relationships to their genitals, most notably the main character, again played by Mr. Shawn, which again only accentuates the audacity of it all.
“All my life I have tried to conceal my comfortable background,” Wally said in an interview once. “I simply couldn't stand for people to know about it, although I suppose anybody with any sophistication would be able to detect it thirty seconds after meeting me. I'm not at all a self-created person. Most of what I believe and know has been given to me, along with the advantages of having grown up in relative comfort.”
You get the feeling with Grasses of a Thousand Colors that this is Shawn’s swan song. The sex is frequent and X-rated enough to turn a lot of readers off. But, if you make it to the end, you find yourself re-evaluating everything that happened throughout this play, and it takes on a wholly different tone. It’s one of those plays you don’t appreciate until the last moment.
In a 1983 piece published in Esquire entitled, The Secret Life of Wallace Shawn, Mr. Shawn is quoted as saying, “So I’ve come to believe that artistic works may have their place in saving the world.” While at the same time, in that same piece, the author describes observing Wally Shawn speaking on the phone:
“…his funny, somehow sensual face flickers back and forth between two images: sometimes he looks like a clown with his makeup off, and sometimes he looks like a clown with his makeup on.”
But something remarkable has happened here, at the end of his career, both concealed from us, as in not physically there, but all the more intimate as just voices. In fact, hearing his dramatic works performed as a radio drama, it’s hard to imagine experiencing them any way else. These are plays where everything is narrated. Listening, you have to wonder whether Wally Shawn’s fortunes would have been different if he’d been writing in the age of radio.
“The only guide I have in writing is being honest with myself about whether I'm really interested in something or whether I'm actually sort of bored by it. And truthfully,” he has said, “I'm interested in the intimate side of life … What [people] do after the company has gone home and what suffering they may experience in the middle of the night. Our society is sort of divided up so all those most interesting things are hidden. The ordinary way that we modern Western people tend to think of ourselves, um ... Uh, doesn't really ... Um, uhh ... take account of, uh, sex. That makes sex very interesting as a subject. For some reason, people think that it's an easy or superficial subject and that if you keep going back to it again and again in your writing, you must be a little frivolous. Even people who like my plays sort of wink when they refer to them, even to me, because it's taken for granted that if the subject of sex is mentioned in the play it isn't really serious the way a play about death or illness is. But in all sincerity, it seems to me to be the center of gravity. Sex is a way in which the mysterious forces of the universe find themselves inside predictable bourgeois lives and overthrow their predictability. It's a very powerful force that perhaps everyone else understands, and I don't. Or perhaps nobody understands.”
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In both The Designated Mourner and Grasses of a Thousand Colors, sex and horror are always intertwined. Beneath the veneer of so-called polite society exists a teeming pool of horror and sex that can do nothing but erupt out with an increasing intensity. This is the world of Wally Shawn.
“What I’m really involved in when I’m writing is something that no one every mentions when they see any play,” says Shawn. “Writing is like trying to make gunpowder out of chemicals. You have these words and sentences and the strange meanings and associations that are attached to the words and sentences, and you’re somehow cooking these things all up so that they suddenly explode and have a powerful effect. That’s what absorbs me from day to day in writing a play.”
I remember Sarah Ruhl once saying that she got into playwriting because she could do with it things she could not accomplish with poetry, or would not be accepted there. Wally Shawn does to plays things that are not acceptable there, which is the ultimate secret to both his success and lack of success. As he says in The Fever:
“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 me out the window of a passing train.”
In his 1983 piece for Esquire, Don Shewey describes Our Late Night opening at the Public Theatre, and how the language of the play, and “particularly the febrile description of satyriasis,” drove the audience crazy. "Some were shouting," Joe Papp, the show’s producer, later recalled, "and one man got up and walked around in a menacing way. They didn't even know they were doing it. Wally was looking around the theater, very perplexed—he didn't realize he had gotten rid of his own sexual mania and given it to everybody else."
The thing about Wally Shawn is specifically this. His plays seem to be concealing something uncomfortably personal even when they are at the same time unnervingly universal.
"There are real disputes between nations, and it may be that we'll never get rid of wars until we end the nation-state as an institution. But it's also true that if every single person in the whole world were exactly like...my father, for example, somehow there would be fewer wars, because there's just something about his personality that, if everybody were like him, people would be seeking a peaceful resolution of their differences. Whereas if everybody were like Hitler, there would be wars all the time. So you think, well, what made Hitler like Hitler and my father like my father? It's the experience they've had and the people they've met and the artistic works that have influenced them."
Shawn stops and coughs. End of speech. "So I've come to believe," he says, "that artistic works may have their place in saving the world."
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All quotes for this article were taken from the 1983 Esquire article, The Secret Life of Wally Shawn, by Don Shewey
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
