Customer Reviews

Writing Wrongs (American Subjects)

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We needed a good book on Wallace Shawn -- in fact, we still do. But this is something. The summary of early plays is quite helpful, considering how hard it is to find these and actually read them (besides, on the basis of the summaries of some of these -- particularly 'The Hospital Play' -- I'm not sure I'd want to read them.) And some of the points are interesting, but they seem isolated -- there is no large thesis or vision uniting the book. Still, when Shawn takes hold of you, you want to read everyting you can find on him. The best part is the interview between WS and Mark Strand, which is simply fascinating.

"Writing Wrongs" is a fine, very helpful book. King does a nice job of laying out the broad strokes of Shawn's dramatic philosophy, while simultaneously providing enough detail about the individuals works themselves. The greatest benefit of King's summaries is their thoroughness. These summaries are not the pat, shallow kinds of things that are far too common in treatments like these. In particular, King's handling of "Our Late Night," a shockingly-hard-to-find play from the early 1970s is to be commended. King's ability to bring forth the biting sarcasm and sagacity of "Our Late Night" is one of the highest points of his book. More generally, I cannot imagine that the broadly outlined, yet detailed approach was an easy balance to strike, and King should be applauded for his facility. I must, however, agree with the previous reviewer that the definitive work on Shawn is still to be written.

There's so much to savor in this book. There's just the right amount of commentary by Shawn himself and the people he's worked with; the plays are placed in the context of Shawn's life, his evolving experimentation as a writer, and his lifelong engagement with the production of live theater; the discussion of little-seen early plays adds considerable depth to the work as a whole; and King's summaries of the plays are generally very well done (with the exception of The Designated Mourner, which he misreads badly in a way that unfortunately many critics have done - then again, the play was still very new at the time).

What remains is uneven and sometimes maddening, especially when it comes to the parallels and divergences between Shawn and other writers. King makes some good points, but has a tendency to pound a vague metaphor into the ground, and gets so carried away describing Shawn as an "anti-theater" rebel that he makes a few clumsy and ridiculous statements (at one point he lumps together O'Neill, Chekhov, Kafka, Beckett, and Ionesco in a single modernist movement that he insists Shawn is entirely separate from); he later backs off from these, mostly. I got the (possibly unfair) impression that the author was not particularly familiar with or interested in experimental theater after 1950, and that this made it harder to explain what's unique about Shawn.

All in all, it's an essential book for anyone who cares about Shawn's plays, but you'll need a high tolerance for a certain kind of overconfident academic writing.

(There's a longer review on my website, A Wallace Shawn Reference, which I must admit owes a huge amount to King's book.)