Quoted in "Is Wallace Shawn the Only Avant-Garde Artist Who Gets Stopped in Times Square? He’s most commonly recognized for his screen roles as a plotting hit man and an unlikely Lothario, but it’s his work as a playwright that shows more of his true self" (NYT)(gift link, because the article is long and there's a lot going on, including the way strangers are always exclaiming "Inconceivable!" at him).
Unlike many of his characters, Shawn speaks slowly and with many pauses in the service of sentences that ultimately emerge perfectly formed. He is also polite and courtly and at great pains not to offend, so much so that one fears inadvertently violating whatever code of etiquette is obviously almost sacred to him. So private that he asked me not to reveal what he ate throughout our meetings, he nonetheless has written a play whose broad outlines, and even some poignant details, are flagrantly autobiographical....
The new play is "Moth Days." There's also a new production of his older play "The Fever." And you don't have to tell me, Althouse, you should go to New York and see both plays. I haven't traveled in years.
ADDED: The full title of the play is "What We Did Before Our Moth Days." According to the linked article, "Moth Days" are "those fluttery, flyaway moments before death, as one of the characters imagines them." Poetically, "moth" calls to mind mother... and also that Yeats line, "And when white moths were on the wing/And moth-like stars were flickering out...."
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I saw it in NYC, with some famous movie star with a J in her name, afterwards I called it "A Long Play's Journey Into Night." I guess I missed something, I know it had to do with alcoholism... It seemed more like fodder for a therapy session. Supposedly it is an autobiographical play, but if you want a thinly disguised autobiography of an artists family life, I will take Caddyshack any day.
“When Donald Trump was re-elected, Shawn had momentary doubts about the timing of such a personal play.”
Not to slag Wallace Shawn, who's done all right for himself, but there are also 13 year olds thrilled by the truthfulness of the natural world who pursue a career in STEM and produce more than highbrow entertainment.
Avoid New York. Go to local HS, teach the theater kids good theater rather than protesting. Everybody wins.
Inconceivable the lines in princess bride echo his earlier ambitiond to work for the state department
Well, I had no idea he is a playwright. To me he has always just been Vizzini. (It did occur to me that no one could JUST play that role, and therefore he must be a character actor of some talent, but I can't think of anything else in which I've ever seen him. "Unlikely Lothario" - vanishingly unlikely in my book, so maybe I should seek that out, whatever it is.)
"So private that he asked me not to reveal what he ate throughout our meetings"
But wasn't dinner important to the Rex-beats-Zurg guy? Did we ever find out what either he or Andre ate during their joint Dinner?
Most recently he was on that show about the boy genius
But he had a fulbright to study indian culture after harvard
When Donald Trump was re-elected, Shawn had momentary doubts about the timing of such a personal play. “I wrote this during the Biden era!” he tells me. “At first I was upset because I thought, ‘I really would like to have written a play that explicitly cries out against the murderous regime of Trump and the evil that has happened.’
If this guy believes Biden was some kind of respite from “evil” he must read and believe the NYT everyday as part of his NYC “bourgeoise” lifestyle every bit as predictable as his fruit salad for lunch.
Robert gleason who seemed a mild mannered book editor revealed his extreme tds some years ago
Meade can stay home and watch the house and dogs and drop you at the airport... number one son can pick you up on the other end and take time off to escourt you 24/7 in the big city.
If you don't do this now in your early 80s, you'll kick yourself when the mid 80s are upon you soon enough...
Dont blog it while it's happening. Blog it when you are back safely "home". At least at your age, you know where home is... some still don't. 😔
We saw that off broadway play that showed schenkens delusion
That was a nice read. i always wondered if shawn was related to the famous New Yorker editor. Of course, I'm not sure why the word "avante garde" is used with Shawn. He's a fixture of the NY broadway scene and he's in his 80s. He seems about as avante-garde as Steven Speilberg.
I haven't traveled in years.
You keep telling us that, as though you’re virtue signaling. You aren’t. You’re merely eccentric.
I usually like Shawn in movies where he just plays it straight and uses his odd appearance and voice for comedic effect. He's horrible in DS9. Partly its the writing but its also because he hams it up.
BTW, here's what he says about Trump (which seems Very, Very Establishment):
“I wrote this [play ] during the Biden era! At first I was upset because I thought, ‘I really would like to have written a play that explicitly cries out against the murderous regime of Trump and the evil that has happened.’ But now I’m feeling, ‘Well, this gang of people who have clustered around Trump — and Trump himself — they’re violently opposed to sympathy for other human beings."
So vizzini what do you about them
patinkin has revealed conventional tds i dont know if elwes has reflected on the subject
I don't need to go anywhere, I'm already here. Its a sentiment I can relate to. Personally, I doubt I would go to NYC again. Great food. And the Met was nice. But not much else that you can't get elsewhere in the USA. Shawn aside, Broadway isn't a hot bed of intellectual plays and great drama.
Ah yes, the "murderous regime of Trump." Good times! I'm old enough to remember the "murderous regime of Nixon," when Neil Young convinced me that "tin soldiers and Nixon's coming" and "soldiers are cutting us down." How many more, they asked? Well, it turns out, zero more. Good job CSNY, you stopped the "murderous Nixon regime" through your powerful activist song!
"This is true. Everything else is fake."
Not surprising you felt that way. Your dad had another family with Lillian Ross on the other side of town.
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Wally's brother Allen is also a writer and composer.
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Playwright Wally's best known work may be the one where Linda Hunt played an admirer of Henry Kissinger and Adolf Hitler
I challenge Althouse to write a post three years from now about where Shawn falls on the political spectrum after 3 years of Mamdani as mayor.
"Your dad had another family with Lillian Ross on the other side of town."
It's probably why I like Caddyshack, I can relate to the huge family the Murrays grew up in, the dad working in the lumber yard, the oldest brother working as a caddy, the Murray's account of their early life was true and honest.
I remember reading donald freeds book length rants the spymaster and the china card
I didn't realize it for a long time, but the head caddy in Caddyshack ('Lou Loomis') is Bill Murray's brother, and the same guy that he saves from choking in Groundhog Day. He was also one of the screenwriters in Caddyshack.
I love how the New Yorker casually discloses in a photo caption the restaurant and dish eaten which the author does not mention at the request of the interviewee in the article.
Oddly it never occurred to me Shawn was the son of the famous New Yorker editor. But it does explain something about his career.
I was confused by the article saying his first character part was in "Manhattan" when he played Annie Hall's ex in the earlier film.
A 13 year old who likes Long Days Journey into Night would kill himself by age 19. This is a bullshit anecdote.
After of course, Vizzini, I'd say his most enduring role was on Star Trek Deep Space Nine. He played The Grand Nagus, greedy conniving leader of the greedy, conniving Ferenghi. I've always thought the make up was intended to be an extreme, fun house mirror version of Ronald Reagan. I can enjoy a talented performer despite unsavory politics.
Interesting, about not traveling in years. In my head I have always thought you traveled extensively. You seem and sound like a big traveler! Why have you not traveled in years if you don't mind telling us?
“ I was confused by the article saying his first character part was in "Manhattan" when he played Annie Hall's ex in the earlier film.”
You are misremembering. Diane Keaton was also in Manhattan and it was in that movie where she had a Wallace Shawn character as a former lover. I believe the Woody Allen character refers to him as a homunculus. That is from the very beginning of his film career Shawn was used as someone to be laughed at for his ridiculous looks.
i though that was him, then again I thought jackie mason was the voice of the aardvark, in the old pink panther cartoons
I remember a story in "American Splendor" -- Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comic book, which was immortalized in a 2003 movie -- in which he met Wallace Shawn, and hoped the public intellectual and well-known movie actor could help him get something published. Shawn responded that he actually had no real power to get anything done, and he had enough trouble getting anyone to put on his own plays or publish his essays.
Is there some knowable correlation between the suggestion, "You should do X", and " I haven't done X in years"? Why would we limit our entreaties thusly?
The Shawns were talented, but odd ducks. William Shawn was timid and finicky. Allen has a social phobia. His twin, Mary, was autistic and institutionalized. And then there's Wallace.
New Yorker families remind me of the family in the Woody Allen movie where one child is a conservative Republican, but it turns out that he has a brain tumor.
No relation to Dick Shawn, the comedian, I guess. He was a weird one, but he had a great end: He had a massive coronary on stage in the middle of his act, and dropped dead, right on his face. Whammo ! But because his brand of comedy was so quirky, the audience thought it was part of his act. It took quite a few minutes before somebody finally came on stage and checked him out.
My sister and I saw the first act of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," and walked out at intermission. The acting was fine. It was everyone being crazy, alcoholic and/or dying of TB. Eloquently and at great length.
“The Man-Moth” by Elizabeth Bishop
Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”
Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
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