Essays

May 31, 2010
Caveat emptor: these witty, ironic, and observant essays by Wallace Shawn are brought to audio in a shoddy production with such poor sound quality that listeners may justifiably demand their money back. The microphone skips in and out so that parts of Shawn's narration are almost completely lost. In a reproduction of the 2004 interview that Shawn conducted with MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, the volume modulation varies so widely in the interview's second half that listening becomes irritating and difficult. (And the narration itself is confusing: Shawn plays Chomsky while Brian Jones plays Shawn, a role reversal that will sound bizarre to listeners who have already spent more than an hour with Shawn reading as himself.) Advice to Shawn's many fans: buy the hardcover of these worthy essays or seek out the pieces online; free versions of some are available on various Web sites or even on youtube.com. A Haymarket hardcover.

July 1, 2009
Personal and political essays from actor and playwright Shawn (Grasses of a Thousand Colors, 2009, etc.).

The author delivers a curious collection of fraught essays addressing, in the main, the implications of living a privileged, comfortable life in a world largely populated by the desperate, hopeless and exploited. A self-described child of privilege—his father was a venerable editor of the New Yorker—Shawn ponders his culpability in a system designed to keep the elite fat and happy while millions starve, concluding that the enjoyment of those privileges can only be seen as monstrous. Readers hoping for a solution to this inequity should look elsewhere. Shawn is content to lament the dire state of the world from the vantage of his cozy existence in the world of arts and letters, scolding himself, and his audience, for his participation in such a wicked enterprise as contemporary society. Written in a faux-na™ve style aiming for a disarming, childish simplicity, Shawn's short essays become repetitive and ultimately numbing. There are, however, interesting and well-observed bits on such far-flung topics as the offensiveness of patriotism, pornography addiction and the plight of waiters in fancy restaurants. Shawn also includes pieces on his life and work in the ivory tower of the artist, including an erudite interview with poet Mark Strand and a look at the creative process behind his celebrated plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon, which, with its disquisitions on the relative morality of figures like Adolph Hitler and"ordinary" people, touches on the themes of his politically inclined writings. Shawn is an urbane, lucid prose stylist, but this slim volume fails to satisfy. Perhaps the dynamic volubility and self-absorption of erstwhile dinner companion Andre Gregory would have provided a bracing contrast to the politely despairing nuggets offered here.

Well-intentioned and limpidly written, but thin and repetitive—a morsel, not a meal.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 1, 2009
Shawn has cultivated two public personae: the cuddly, lovable, befuddled comic actor and the impassioned, self-righteous, sacred-cow-goring writer. Shawn the fiery iconoclast dominates this wide-ranging set of essays mostly written in the last decade, though one dates from 1985. As anyone who has seen or read Shawns polemical play The Fever knows, he is a gifted, eloquent, slyly witty writer, capable of being as discomfiting about theater as about politics. This collection contains many fine pieces, most dealing in one way or another with social justice and Shawns dismay that our comfortable American lives have been built on the backs of others. These ideas are discussed most succinctly in the oldest piece in the volume, the elegantly written 1985 essay composed to accompany the published version of his play, Aunt Dan and Lemon. Two interviews Shawn conducted complement the essays; one is with poet Mark Strand, the other with linguist and political radical Noam Chomsky.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)