A short life of the author
Wallace Shawn (born 12 November 1943) is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and actor who has led one of the most improbable double careers in American cultural life. To the general public, he is a beloved character actor — Vizzini in The Princess Bride (“Inconceivable!”), Rex in Toy Story, and the star of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981). To the theatre world, he is one of the most important and most uncomfortable American playwrights alive — a writer whose plays confront their audiences with questions about privilege, complicity, and the moral cost of comfort that most theatre refuses to ask. The son of William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker, Wallace Shawn grew up at the centre of American literary culture and has spent his career attacking the moral complacency of the world he came from.
Life
Shawn was born in New York City, the son of William Shawn and Cecille Shawn. His father edited The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987, shaping the magazine into the most influential literary publication in America. Wallace grew up surrounded by writers — his childhood acquaintances included J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and virtually every significant American writer of the mid-century. He was educated at the Dalton School, Harvard, and Oxford (where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics), and his intellectual formation was steeped in the liberal humanist tradition that his work would later interrogate.
He began writing plays in the 1970s and formed a creative partnership with Andre Gregory, the theatre director, that produced both his breakthrough as a playwright and the film My Dinner with Andre (1981), in which Shawn and Gregory play fictionalised versions of themselves having a dinner conversation about art, life, and the nature of experience. The film became a cult classic and made Shawn famous in a way that his plays — performed Off-Broadway and in small theatres — never had.
Plays
Marie and Bruce (1980) is a savage, darkly comic portrait of a marriage — two people who cannot stop hurting each other, trapped in a relationship that is simultaneously intimate and violent. The play established Shawn’s characteristic mode: sophisticated, articulate characters whose civilised surfaces conceal deep wells of cruelty.
Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985) is Shawn’s most controversial play. Lemon, a young Englishwoman, recounts the influence of her parents’ American friend, Aunt Dan — a charismatic intellectual who gradually leads Lemon toward an admiration of Henry Kissinger and, eventually, of the Nazis. The play does not refute Lemon’s conclusions — it presents them with such lucidity and charm that the audience is forced to confront the seductiveness of amoral power. The play was attacked as fascist propaganda by some critics and praised by others as a devastating anatomy of how decent people come to embrace terrible ideas.
The Fever (1991) is a monologue — originally performed by Shawn in private living rooms — in which a wealthy, liberal Westerner lies in a hotel room in a poor country, suffering from a fever and from the growing realisation that his comfortable life is built on the suffering of others. The play is a sustained act of moral self-examination that makes its audience complicit: the speaker’s privilege is the audience’s privilege, and his evasions are theirs.
The Designated Mourner (1996) — starring Shawn, Andre Gregory, and Deborah Eisenberg — is set in an unnamed country sliding toward authoritarianism, and it traces the death of high culture through the lives of three intellectuals. The play asks what happens to poetry, philosophy, and the life of the mind when the political conditions that sustain them are destroyed.
Essays
Shawn’s Essays (2009) collects his political and autobiographical writings — pieces about morality, privilege, Israel/Palestine, George W. Bush, and the experience of being a rich person who writes plays about the moral bankruptcy of being a rich person. The essays are lucid, self-lacerating, and genuinely uncomfortable: Shawn does not exempt himself from the criticism he directs at his class.
Critical Standing
Shawn is one of the most significant American playwrights of the last fifty years — a writer who uses the theatre to conduct moral investigations that most art prefers to avoid. His plays are rarely revived on Broadway because they make audiences uncomfortable, which is precisely their point. The discomfort is structural, not incidental: Shawn writes for the same educated, liberal, culturally sophisticated audience whose moral complacency he is anatomising, and the plays work by making that audience recognise itself. He belongs to a tradition — Brecht, Fassbinder, Handke — that uses theatre as a form of political and moral confrontation, but his tone is uniquely his own: intimate rather than didactic, conversational rather than declamatory, and devastating precisely because it sounds so reasonable.
The Actor and the Writer
The split in Shawn’s career — between the cuddly character actor and the ferocious political playwright — is itself a kind of performance of his central theme. The audiences who love him as Vizzini or Rex are precisely the audiences his plays indict. The genial, self-deprecating screen persona and the pitiless moral examiner coexist in the same person, and neither is a mask: Shawn is genuinely warm and genuinely appalled by the world his warmth inhabits. His acting career has also given him financial independence from the theatre — a freedom that has allowed him to write plays that no commercial producer would touch and to insist on performance conditions (living rooms, small theatres, no intermission) that intensify the audience’s discomfort.
Note: Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, sometimes catalogued under Wallace Shawn’s name, is by a different author.
Collecting Shawn
Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985, Grove Press) in first edition brings $20–$40. The Fever (1991, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) brings $15–$30. The Designated Mourner (1996, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) brings $15–$30. Essays (2009, Haymarket Books) brings $10–$20. Signed copies are available — Shawn is accessible and generous — and bring modest premiums.