When Marie decides to leave Bruce, she delivers herself of a torrent of ferocious humor and foul-mouthed vituperation concerning him and their marriage, not to mention love, hate, caring, commitment, and all the other current clichés about relationships. As he follows Marie and Bruce through breakfast, a friend’s party, and dinner, Wallace Shawn brilliantly orchestrates her savage attacks and his slyly passive defenses into a symphony of subversive propositions about the nature of the marital state.
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"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 atsarah@haymarketbooks.org, 773-583-7884 (office), or 312-315-8476 (cell). Select Advance Reader's copies
"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 atsarah@haymarketbooks.org, 773-583-7884 (office), or 312-315-8476 (cell). Select Advance Reader's copies
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very few people have ear and nerve...,
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This review is from: Marie and Bruce (Wallace Shawn) (Paperback)
...but Wallace Shawn has it in spades. I read Fever in an hour. Short solid piece that would be claustrophobic to put on the way he wants. (In groups of 10-12 people in homes, rather than in a theater) But the theme has been done just as well, in other plays and monologues. Marie and Bruce- harsh, visceral funny, and I can't think any work that better illustrates the worthlessness of language. Miscommunication is my favorite theme, and this play shows it's hand at that in different ways (party banter, "lover's" spat, what isn't said but hangs in the air like an albatross about to meet it's fate) to great effect. People have misread it before (not here, I haven't read these) claiming Marie to be a shrew, and there to be nothing going on or that the play goes "nowhere" without letting the play fully unfold before them. All communication inevitably and inherently lacks. It is the great leveling field. Watching the characters NOT interact, and go nowhere hits like a sucker punch, for we're all suckers aren't we. Fools to think we have meaning. Laughable that we assume we are connecting. Yeah, I laughed 'till I cried with this one. Wouldn't miss it for the world. Fans of Semiotext(e)USA might like this.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
As the play opens, MARIE is wearing a flowery dress. Read the first page New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
As the play opens, MARIE is wearing a flowery dress. Read the first page New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 1
book:
13
books
cite this book:
See all 13 books citing this book
- Aunt Dan and Lemon (Wallace Shawn) by Wallace Shawn in Front Matter
- New York Times Theater Reviews,1985-1986 by Random House Staff on page 169, page 177, and page 178
- Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture) by Deborah Vlock on page 44, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Love, Sex, Death, And The Meaning Of Life: The Films Of Woody Allen by Foster Hirsch on page 123, and page 125
- My Dinner with Andre (Wallace Shawn) by Wallace Shawn in Back Cover
- Aunt Dan and Lemon (Wallace Shawn) by Wallace Shawn in Back Cover
See all 13 books citing this book
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