The Designated Mourner - Acting Edition [Paperback]

Wallace Shawn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002

“The play nicely combines Pinterian menace with caustic political commentary.” –Time

“Acerbic, elusive, poetic and chilling, the writing is demanding in a rarefied manner. Its implications are both affecting and disturbing.” –Los Angeles Times

“In his exquisitely written dramatic lament for the decline of high culture. . . . [Shawn] offers a definition of the self that should rattle the defenses of intellectual snobs everywhere.” –The New York Times

Writer and performer Wallace Shawn’s landmark 1996 play features three characters—a respected poet, his daughter, and her English-professor husband—suspected of subversion in a world where culture has come under the control of the ruling oligarchy. Told through three interwoven monologues, the Orwellian political story is recounted alongside the visceral dissolution of a marriage. The play debuted at the Royal National Theatre in London, in a production directed by David Hare, who also directed the film version, starring Mike Nichols and Miranda Richardson. The play’s subsequent New York premiere was staged in a long-abandoned men’s club in lower Manhattan, directed by Shawn’s longtime collaborator André Gregory.

Wallace Shawn is the author of Our Late Night (OBIE Award for Best Play), Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, and the screenplay for My Dinner with André. His most recent play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, premiered last year in London.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wallace Shawn (A Modest Proposal), known to some as that guy in Clueless, has written a new play called The Designated Mourner. With only three characters and a number of intimate monologues, the play stands up very well as a text. The narrator, Jack, who has married into an elite literary coterie, survives an uprising of the underprivileged that has extinguished his highbrow, literary community, and he finds that he is the only remaining witness.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A deceptively soothing game designed to lead us into a cul-de-sac where we are forced to question our assumptions about ourselves as upholders of civilized values and high cultural standards in an otherwise barbarous world."--Stephen Holden, The New York Times

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc. (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822218488
• ISBN-13: 978-0822218487
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #982,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"Full of what you might call conversation starters: tricky propositions about morality... politics, privilege, runaway nationalist fantasies, collective guilt, and art as a force for change (or not)... It's a treat to hear him speak his curious mind."--O The Oprah Magazine

"Wallace Shawn's essays are both powerful and riveting. How rare to encounter someone willing to question the assumptions of class and the disparity of wealth that grows wider every year in this country. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing."--Michael Moore

"Wallace Shawn's career as a playwright has been uncompromisingly devoted to proving that theater is an ideal medium for exploring difficult matters of great consequence. The qualities that make his dramatic work so challenging, sensual, mind-and-soul expanding, so indispensible, are equally in evidence in the marvelous political and theatrical essays collected here."--Tony Kushner

"Wallace Shawn writes in a style which is deceptively simple, profoundly thoughtful, fiercely honest. His vocabulary is pungent, his wit delightful, his ideas provocative."--Howard Zinn

WITH A BOLD and broad-ranging set of essays, Wallace Shawn takes us on a revelatory journey through high art, war, culture, politics, and privilege. With his distinctive humor and insight, Shawn invites us to look at the world with new eyes, the better to understand and change it.

WALLACE SHAWN is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor. His plays The Designated Mourner and The Fever have recently been produced as films, and his translation of Threepenny Opera was recently performed on Broadway. He is co-author of My Dinner with Andre and the author of The Fever and Aunt Dan and Lemon, among other works. His friends call him Wally.

"I've written plays and a few screenplays, in each one of which a person who isn't me speaks, and then another person who isn't me replies, and then a third one enters or the first one speaks again, and so it goes until the end of the piece. I've even worked as a professional actor, speaking out loud as if I were someone not myself.

Every once in a while, though, I like to take a break from fantasy land, and I go off to the place called Reality for a brief vacation. It's happened a dozen or so times in the course of my life. I've looked at the world from my own point of view, and I've written these essays. I've written essays about reality, the world, and I've even written a few essays about the dream-world of 'art' in which I normally dwell. In a bold mood I've brooded once or twice on the question, Where do the dreams go, and what do they do, in the world of the real?"--From Essays by Wallace Shawn

You can preview the book at Harper's, where an excerpt, "Is Sex Interesting?," of Essays has been published.

Wallace Shawn will be available for select interviews with national media September-October. To request an interview or review copy of Essays, please contact Sarah Macaraeg [e-mail], 773-583-7884 (office), or 312-315-8476 (cell). Select Advance Reader's copies

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elevating our civilization by dramatizing its possible fall, June 18, 2001

By 

jk64jk (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Designated Mourner: A Play (Paperback)

It's difficult to avoid hyperbole when discussing this highly disturbing but exhilarating play. Its main theme is the death of high culture at the hands of a newer, "low" popular culture. The setting is an unnamed country, where the balance of power has shifted violently, and the theme is personified by monologues and dialogues of three characters: a celebrated writer, who is out of favor with the new regime; his doting daughter; and the daughter's husband, the title character who is left to mourn the passing of the highbrow world. The play traces the husband's journey from his inconsequential, powerless place within the rarefied writer's world, to his abandonment of that world for a more debased existence. By play's end, he is the only individual left on the cultural landscape who can comprehend this higher, more humane, intellectual world that has passed out of existence.

Perhaps most impressive about this work is that Shawn has profoundly dramatized his theme through character. His ideas about the decline of high culture - and who prospers, who gets along, and who perishes because of it - are always vibrantly present, because they are told through the characters, all of whom are fully realized and ambiguously sympathetic throughout. Mr. Shawn has written real human beings, not cardboard allegories; and he has set them, via his graceful and succinct language, within beautifully evoked environments. The experiences of the husband as he leaves the high for the low, and his resultant dehumanization, are etched brilliantly. He moves from his intelligent wife to a younger, simpler woman, to a mangy dog, to what he refers to as his "little friends" - images in adult magazines. The endings of the writer and his daughter are even darker, and they are told in beautifully evocative yet simple language, in direct contrast to the ugliness described. It should chill you to the bone.

"The Designated Mourner" was performed last year in New York for a limited run. It was (here comes the hyperbole) perhaps the best piece of theatre I've seen. If it's performed again, make every effort to see it. In the meantime, content yourself with the film version (directed by David Hare, with great performances by Mike Nichols and Miranda Richardson), which lacks some of the masterly power of the Andre Gregory stage production, and read and re-read this extraordinarily resonant text. Shawn elevates our own civilization by superbly dramatizing how it could (may?, will?) plausibly fall apart. He is undoubtedly the most exciting playwright working now.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scarier than a death squad., January 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Designated Mourner: A Play (Paperback)

This is a stunning play.

By all means buy this book, and try to see A Designated Mourner performed on stage if you get the chance. You can also rent the recently released video of the London production starring Mike Nichols as Jack.

As you watch the drama unfold you may cry for the death of love, the death or art. Or -- who knows -- you may feel as if trapped in a humiliating nightmare where you have to watch yourself betray what you value most.

Far, far scarier than the most ruthless death squad is the creeping suspicion that you may actually have less in common with Howard (who dies for art and social justice) or Judy (who dies for love) than with good old Jack (who chooses to live on happily without any of those things.)

Or you may decide that each of the three characters mirrors an aspect of your personality. In that case, the work may reflect a dazzling light on a central drama of your own existance, your internal stuggle to order your values and to express them as you live on in a world which, increasingly perhaps, really couldn't care less.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Eulogy for Humanity, October 11, 2004

By 

Mr. Spiffy - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Designated Mourner (Hardcover)

I saw this show in Philadelphia, presented by local saints of theater Brat Productions. I saw it out of faith in Brat, an interesting review in the newspaper and pure admiration for the low ticket price. I entered the performance with mixed expectations--

and then Wallace Shawn popped out from behind my seat and punched me in the eye. It's hard to come up with a better description than that for the experience. Here was this playwright who I knew only as a character actor, and suddenly he'd opened up new dimensions of what theater could be for me. Since then I've read everything of his I could find (and seen Brat's incredible production of "The Fever") and the impression he's left on me still sings. Shawn's plays are crafted, and brilliantly, from the decaying moral structure of humanity. I cannot stress enough how brave Shawn is for looking the way he does at humanity -- that is, with honesty.

During the performance, "The Designated Mourner" rattled me like a tone poem played on a chainsaw -- Shawn has a unique sound, and a fantastic ability to combine first simplicity and imagery, and then profanity and beauty into a painfully prescient account of the dying human spirit.

Then "Mourner" did something that less and less theater has done for me recently -- it followed me around after the show. It tailed me into the diner I went to afterward and sat on the table between me and my friend. We were both shaken, and since then we've let "Mourner" stay with us.

"The Designated Mourner" has done for me what theater is meant to do: to present a tragedy so bittersweet that it changes lives. It's a eulogy for love, art, politics, humanity and whatever it is in us that can become martyred; and, more importantly, it's a call to action for a world that's killing itself.

None of what I've said is exaggeration. Civilizations fall inside the covers of this book, real and metaphorical; it's preternaturally wise and painfully insightful. It demands to be read.