Wallace Shawn's Ars Poetica ~ 6 August 2008

"It's easier to sleep if your head is elevated, and so people use pillows."

Thus starts the Introduction to the plays "Our Late Night" and "A Thought in Three Parts" by Wallace Shawn. It appears as if Mr. Shawn, a well-known actor (Manhattan, My Dinner with Andre, The Princess Bride, Clueless, and countless others), and playwright (Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner, and others), offers us a hint that his plays are pillow books of his life at the time which is filled with pillow talk, or talk between lovers in bed, with all the trappings involved surrounding such a reference.

The first play, "Our Late Night," takes place at an evening party for seven (4 men, 3 women) in "an apartment—high, very high, above a giant city." The other play, "A Thought in Three Parts," is three small plays in one. The first, "Summer Evening" takes place in a foreign country (unspecified) in a "pleasant hotel room" with "a couple in their late twenties." The second play, "The Youth Hostel," takes place in "two sparsely furnished rooms, not connected, dimly lit, with no windows" with three men and two women taking part in the action. The third play, "Mr. Frivolous," takes place at a breakfast table with a man in his early thirties delivering a soliloquy spoken to an imaginary being longed for in reminiscence.

Shawn introduces the plays by discussing their history in theatre and not their content. This is subterfuge as if to offer you a text that supposedly gives you clues about what you are about to read, yet tells you nothing about what you are about to read. He doesn't describe the plays beforehand, as he wants to surprise the reader with its content. And the reader will be surprised, as Shawn's plays in this book are intentionally shocking as a primitive type of raw energy flows through them, though the plays are totally unrefined, lacking in narrative, and purposefully crass and chaotic. And though, crude in nature, they are intimate studies of relations between heterosexual men and women that is full of humor and surrealistic charm. The lack of plot or narrative motion also seems to evoke a style reminiscent of Beckett's plays.

Shawn writes the Introduction to try to justify his writing and art to his readers and himself, but doesn't know exactly how to answer the question of why his writing merits attention. He wants to say that he writes through the voice of the society in which he lives. He's not trying to change the world with a vision; he describes a social atmosphere or environment to give it representation in the theater. Though his plays are a form of virile and potent masculine vigor, rooted in pleasure and violence, he writes urbanely in the Introduction, and later in the Afterword, tries to justify his reasons for the unsettling themes of the plays. The plays lack realism, and border on an unreality that is generally beyond the imagination of common audience goers. That the plays have rarely been performed in over thirty years is understandable given their outrageous subject matter.

But this is what makes the book so special. You may never get to see the plays for yourself in person, but you can imagine them as if you were in the audience, or even a director of the plays.
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Our Late Night; and, A Thought in Three Parts: Two Plays by Wallace Shawn
Theatre Communications Group, New York, 2008. ISBN 978-1-55936-322-8