Gabriel Boyer

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.