REAL THEATER: from Wallace Shawn’s The Fever

If you’re a regular reader of Real Art, you may remember that last April I played a bit part in a show written by character actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, The Hotel Play. Later, in June, I linked to an essay he wrote during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Clearly, Shawn is a quirky, innovative writer with a big sense of social conscience.

Case in point, Shawn’s long monologue for performance, The Fever. I picked it up to look at a section to use as a monologue for school, but while reading it I happened on another passage that fits into Real Art quite nicely. Here it is:

And so in our frozen world, our silent world, we have to talk to the poor. Talk, listen, clarify, explain. They want things to be different. They want change. And so we say, Yes. Change. But not violent change. Not theft, not revolt, not revenge. Instead, listen to the idea of gradual change. Change that will help you, but that won’t hurt us. Morality. Law. Gradual change. We explain it all—a two-sided contract: we’ll give you things, many things, but in exchange you must accept that you don’t have the right just to take what you want. We’re going to give you wonderful things. Sit down, wait, don’t try to grab—the most important thing is patience, waiting. We’re going to give you much much more than you’re getting now, but there are certain things that must happen first—these are the things for which we must wait. First, we have to make more and we have to grow more, so more will be available for us to give. Otherwise, if we give you more, we’ll have less. When we make more and we grow more, we can all have more—some of the increase can go to you. But the other thing is, once there is more, we have to make sure that morality prevails. Morality is the key. Last year, we made more and we grew more, but we didn’t give you more. All of the increase was kept for ourselves. That was wrong. The same thing happened the year before, and the year before that. We have to convince everyone to accept morality and next year give some of the increase to you.

So we all have to wait.

The play is essentially an argument in favor of considering worldwide poverty relative to American abundance and materialism, along with the violence and murder that supports the US lifestyle, but it’s not at all as dry as that might sound. It’s performed in terms of a tourist in a third world country sick with some sort of traveler’s illness; while collapsed on the floor of his hotel bathroom, in between bouts of throwing up, the unnamed character relates a stream-of-consciousness series of tales and images that ultimately lead to a rather grim conclusion: “Nothing is changing in the life of the poor. There is no change. Gradual change is not happening. It’s not going to happen. It’s only something that we talked about.”

In spite of the dark truth that Shawn reveals, this is actually an entertaining script.

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