The Designated Mourner: A Play (Paperback)

by Wallace Shawn (Author) "A "highbrow" was a person who liked the finer things-you know, saving the Rembrandt from the burning building, rather than the baby or the fried..." (more)
Key Phrases: designated mourner, John Donne

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
-- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525269
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525262
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #991,270 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 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

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 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.