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The Designated Mourner: A Play

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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.

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.

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.

The Designated Mourner is an amazing work. In it Wallace Shawn creates a world, similar to our own, in an unknown country or time, which could be America, in which the intellectual minority, which regards the ignorant majority as The Enemy, suffers the rebellion of the masses, and the end of it's superior hold on quality and acceptibility.
Sound political? This could be France on the verge of Revolution, or Russia or any place where thought and a deep seeded "knowledge" of what is worthy and unworthy in the world remains the whimsical argument of the upper class.

What makes it even more amazing is the shadows and mystery of the story. Jack, the main character, is a man who has never liked the upper class circles he and his wife and father swim in. And when such associations become dangerous, his position adapts. Intent of survival, and curious about revenge, he realizes his experience, having existed in both upper and lower classes gives him a level of understanding which can only be mourned over.

A stand out paragraph: "After a while I just concluded there wasn't any hope-an importnant insight. There'd be no happiness in my own life, nor would peace be won in the world at large. Was there anything, then that I could expect to achieve in the coming years? Well, perhaps I could somehow train my mind to focus less compulsively on terrifying images of death and disease. Perhaps I could learn how to pass more easily from one moment to the next, the way the monkey, our ancestor, shifts so easily along from branch to branch as he follows the high road through the forest at night. Let me learn how to repose in the quiet shade of a nice square of chocolate, a nice slice of cake. A delicious cup of tea isn't, perhaps, that hard to come by; the trick to be learned is just not to think of other things while you drink it."-Page 75-76

This book will be enjoyed by those who liked Shawn's film "My dinner With Andre". It shares some similarity with the film by using clever dialog, often apparent non sequiturs, strung together to create an interesting pattern of thought. Readers who demand a more conventional, linear plot might be disappointed but they will certainly be given something to think about.

What is highbrow, what is lowbrow? How much life can be squeezed out of one body? Some ideas are like formalized greetings. Wallace Shawn's work is witty and loving. It has been suggested that the play is an allegory of his father's role as editor of THE NEW YORKER. True or not, everyone needs stories and this play is a gem.

The characters are Howard, Jack, and Judy. Judy and Jack are married to each other. Jack says he met his wife Judy when he was trying to buy a pair of pajamas. Howard is Judy's father and of course he is remarkable but that does not mean that Jack wants to be a disciple. He does envy Howard and the whole gang of them, the unbearables. The couple moves to their own apartment but Howard is sick and can not be expected to live by himself. Jack describes the places Judy loves as tropical nightmare zones.

Jack wonders why he walks around in a stooped posture and why there is an intolerable noise in his head. Jack reports that Howard is a rat himself but that others begg him to be their leader in their war against rats. At a point when Jack is misbehaving mildly it comes to him that he can not stand Howard. Jack leaves. He has an affair with Peg.

Jack says, "Maybe my problem was just having been very unhappy--you know, unhappiness being a cold sort of marshland in which other emotions refuse to grow." He says that everyone wonders if magnificent success will be achieved and if there will be marvelous self-expression. Jack calls his diary Experiments in Privacy. When everyone from a tribe dies out, there has to be a designated mourner to mourn the last survivor. Jack feels he is the designated mourner.

The writing is bright and new. I would like to see this acted.

I recently had the opportunity to meet Wallace Shawn at a book signing/reading. He is an unusual man who seems uncomfortable with people, but a wonderful reader. The play itself is worth reading on your own, too. I've never read a play quite like this one. The three characters--Jack, Judy,and Howard--actually speak to the audience. It is monologue after monologue. Yet somehow it all comes together beautifully. Humor abounds in The Designated Mourner. It has recently been made into a film, although I believe it is only being presented in Seattle, Washington at this time

Shawn is a remarkable thinker, but a limited dramatist. One gets the sense that the theater itself, as a genre, is a bit too low for him, that 'playing' to an audience is a compromise he'd just as soon not make. So be it. The theater needs someone like him and, evidently, he can afford to live off the proceeds of his 20-seat chamber pieces. His themes are exciting here and in other works such as "My Dinner With Andre" and "The Fever," to take but two examples. He is distrustful of the highly sophisticated cultural world he grew up in, distrustful of intellectuals, afraid of the powers intellectuals have to deceive themselves and others into believing, among other things, that there is no morality. While other artists seek admission to this rarefied world, Wallace Shawn takes a step back. In this play, Jack plays a kind of Aunt Dan character, the highly persuasive lover of evil, the entrancing deceiver, the empty aesthete, who is capable of murder or complacency, or indifference. It's unnerving material. Shawn is one of the handful of playwrights worldwide willing to attack his self-satisfied audience, full of snobby, snotty 'innocents'. This play is rich, but as drama it fails. It belongs to the other immortal Greek tradition; it is a platonic dialog.

I've studied theatre intently and attended well over a hundred shows. This is single-handedly the most boring thing I've ever witnessed. After thirty minutes of static elitist droning, I found it impossible to focus on anything other than planning my escape. It's like Woody Allen after the humor and movement have been boiled out and all you are left with are a group of people who pride themselves on their intellectual topics of conversation. It's exactly the sort of thing Chekhov would have made fun of.