REVIEW: Wallace Shawn’s ‘The Fever’ returns off-Broadway with Lili Taylor
Photo: Lili Taylor stars in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever as part of the Audible Theater series at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by BBB with permission.
Lili Taylor, the acclaimed actor of stage, TV and film, offers a commanding performance in Wallace Shawn’s ever-timely monologue play The Fever, now playing a limited engagement off-Broadway as part of the Audible Theater series at the Minetta Lane Theatre. In the show, Taylor plays a nameless character who offers her thoughts on class, labor, life and all things economic. She works her way through a meandering, yet never dull journey into the heart of human relations, human perceptions, human frailty and ultimately human injustice.
Over the course of 90 minutes (Taylor jokes it may take her 100 minutes), the character goes deeper and deeper into difficult, trying subject matter.Details are sometimes few and far between, but the audience knows there’s a hotel room in a country where they don’t speak the character’s language. The country is similarly unnamed, but it’s described as far from the comfortable world where the character resides (presumably this character is a stand-in for Shawn, a well-known playwright and actor himself). The divide that this person feels in this new environment becomes the backbone of the play, with the monologue twisting and turning around all matter of issues, both political and personal.
At its heart, The Fever is about a person troubled by the economic inequality people are born into and how separated the classes of the world seem to be. This character construction is analyzed (and deconstructed) in contrast to those individuals who do not have the same luxuries in life, individuals who may clean up after the elite and then go home to a small apartment in a tough neighborhood, as Taylor outlines during the monologue. The differences between these various lives are dissected and confronted during the performance, and the reality of this inequality and privilege, which seems to be inescapable in a capitalist system, bothers the protagonist. She is unable to get beyond the inherent wrongness of this unfortunate conclusion, but she’s unable to linguistically carve out a solution. How does she help this problem? Is she the right person to offer a solution? Is she herself the problem?
Taylor is one of the most exciting actors working today. Her performances over the years have been marvelous, and in The Fever she is able to unmitigatedly showcase her art form’s possibilities and her skills as an interpreter. She utilizes few props and a spartan set, which includes a centerstage comfy chair, yet she is able to keep the audience entranced with Shawn’s words. The two have collaborated before, and there seems to be an ease and admiration that Taylor has for the playwright’s musings on life and society. The same goes for the show’s director, Scott Elliott, who has worked with Shawn extensively.
For some, The Fever may be too experimental in nature, too stripped of what an evening of theater is meant to look like. Then again, this monologue has been around town more than once, with Shawn playing the part in a previous production. Plus, there’s a movie starring Vanessa Redgrave, Angelina Jolie, Joely Richardson and Michael Moore.
If Shawn’s words are new to an audience, then Taylor’s performance will ring devastatingly powerful and pertinent, no matter if the character’s assertions are accepted, debated, resisted or rejected. If Shawn’s words are known to the audience, they will still prove intimately effective, drawing theatergoers into a conversation (well, a one-way conversation at least) about a topic that is uncomfortably apparent in and outside the theater, one continually ripped from the headlines.
This is not activist theater, with an obvious request for the audience to change something about their lives, but it is introspective theater that invites self-reflection, self-criticism and inner dialogue. The Fever is a dream that outlines a nightmare that may prove true.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Fever, written by Wallace Shawn and directed by Scott Elliott, stars Lili Taylor. Audible and The New Group co-produce. Currently playing the Audible Theater series at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
