Four Plays: A Thought in Three Parts, Mane and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, the Fever [Paperback]

Wallace Shawn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1998

Award-winning playwright and actor Wallace Shawn offers four plays with themes that include sexual convention, historical guilt, and the conflict between high and low culture, all described with remarkable and attentive language. Shawn's plays are prizes for any reader ready to be challenged with new, unflinching (and maybe even dangerous) ways of looking at the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Shawn is best known as a small, cuddly, balding character actor who often plays little guys on the verge of personal crises. But for 20 years or so, he has been an off-Broadway playwright, penning vicious little comedies obsessed with portraying the dark side of life. In Marie and Bruce, for instance, he shows us, in one darkly funny act, a comically neurotic New York couple trapped in a decidedly sadomasochistic relationship. In Aunt Dan and Lemon, he reveals in several short, powerful scenes just how much a privileged life depends on the exploitation of those lower in the food chain. Rounding out this collection of four of Shawn's better-known works are his hard-to-find early play A Thought in Three Parts and the script to his brilliant 1990 solo show, The Fever, a starkly written, harrowing journey into one man's dark night of the soul that is as searing on the page as it is on the stage. Jack Helbig

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Noonday Press; 1st Noonday pbk. ed edition (June 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525358
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525354
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,493,434 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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars most underrated american playwright, February 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Four Plays: A Thought in Three Parts, Mane and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, the Fever (Paperback)

Wally Shawn is truly a genius, unsung, who has influenced a number of important playwrights and writers. Peremptorily odd plays and not for everyone, but artful, articulate, risky and amazing...he'll be appreciated postmortem, but read him now, and pray that he gets produced more often in the US.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A genius playwright who doesn't get enough credit, July 23, 2003

By 

Tommy Long (Houlton, ME United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Four Plays: A Thought in Three Parts, Mane and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, the Fever (Paperback)

A THOUGHT IN THREE PARTS- a brilliant trilogy of three plays where Shawn explores the consequences of minds laid bare. A very sexually charged no bull dialogue where thoughts are scattered and pieced together without inhibition to explore human thought. An amazing play that really draws you in.

MARIE AND BRUCE- Another blunt exploration of the human condition in which Shawn portrays a wife with no problem laying her thoughts and feelings out in the open against a socially and emotionally inhibited husband who easily bends to the strong, decisive will of his wife because of his lack of will and superficial feelings. It is much more complex than I could explain but an impressive contrast of characters.

AUNT DAN AND LEMON- A very interesting tale of a girl and her friendship with an acquaintance of the family that leads her to explore truths that doesn't get discussed at cocktail parties. A good story that gets turned into great social commentary.

THE FEVER- An unbelieveable tale of a privelaged man recalling the tale of his growing up and sorting out the ideas of Communism but more so of social class. He goes through a mental journey of how he came to be in possession of the things he has and the history behind political movements. The best piece of social and political literature I've ever read. There's a lot of truth in this play and I would recommend this over any works of Marx.

Overall a collection of four great plays. No weak link. Wallace Shawn is truly one of the greatest playwrights of our time. I'm sure we'll all look back and realize this.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique and disturbing, November 20, 2001

By 

Matthew Cheney (New Hampton, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Four Plays: A Thought in Three Parts, Mane and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, the Fever (Paperback)

There is not, and to my knowledge has never been, a playwright like Wallace Shawn. His plays are not the least bit entertaining, nor were they intended to be. They are the intellectual equivalent of dining on razor blades.

This collection is a nice balance of his early, sexually and emotionally explicit plays -- imagine "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" meets "Oh, Calcutta" -- along with his two great works of political and moral philosophy, "Aunt Dan and Lemon" and "The Fever".

It's hard to describe the latter works, hard to convey their brilliance, difficulty, and, finally, their tremendous ability to disturb. "The Fever" is a monologue and "Aunt Dan and Lemon" relies as much on monologue as dialogue, so neither has ever been much of a hit with audiences used to soundbites and smash cuts. Both could also be said to be assaults on the audience, for you cannot sit through productions of them or read them without having some fundamental beliefs questioned and, if you've really paid attention, upset. At their heart, these works seek to undermine a simple belief which most of us take for granted: that we live a relatively moral, decent life and that we are, at heart, a good person.

There are very few writers who I think are truly necessary, writers without whose voices I would feel absolutely bereft, even less human. Wallace Shawn is one of those writers.