Since first appearing on film in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Wallace Shawn has become one of Hollywood’s most distinctive character actors, familiar to audiences for his striking performances in everything from The Princess Bride to The L Word. But theatergoers also know another side of Wallace Shawn; the relentlessly daring playwright whose work challenges conventional ideas about theater, power, sex, class, and, most unsparingly, liberal complacency.

We spoke with Shawn on Saturday about Kurnaz, politics and what will be his first new play since his unforgettable 1996 work, The Designated Mourner.

Who is Murat Kurnaz? He is a man of Turkish background who was born in Germany and has lived all his life in Germany. When he was 19 he decided to study his religion more intensively by making a trip to Pakistan. This was just after September 11th, 2001 and he was only there for a couple of months. When he tried to return to Germany he was arrested by the Pakistani police. It’s a complicated story, but because he had gone to that part of the world rather suddenly and he’d become more religious, somebody got it into their head that maybe he was planning to join the Taliban or something of that nature, which was not the case.

And it was, you could say, a comedy of errors. Eventually he was sent to Guantanamo and he spent a total of five years in prison – first in Kandahar in an American prison and then in Guantanamo, before finally being released. And now he lives as a free man in Germany. He was 19 when he was arrested and he was a shipbuilder’s apprentice.

Has he been able to go back to his former life? Well, no, he’s not any longer studying ship building and his book, Five Years of My Life, is really about his prison experiences; he doesn’t say too much about how he’s doing today, except that he’s living at home. He had gotten married just before going on a trip but as he disappeared without a trace and no one knew if he would ever return, his wife divorced him.

And you’re going to be reading from this memoir Friday night at the New York Public Library. What is it about Five Years of My Life that made an impression on you? Well, it’s a first person account of being imprisoned by the Americans in Kandahar and then in Guantanamo. And he observed what was happening with a lot of clarity and describes the way he was treated in a great deal of detail. It’s a story of two prison camps which, clearly, were being run by people who felt that the story would never be told and that they were free to treat the prisoners in a way that no one could ever treat another human being if they thought the story would ever come out, or that there would ever be a legal process.

Of course, the people there were picked up in a great variety of ways from a great variety of places, and of course many of them, and maybe most of them, you could say were picked up by mistake, like Kurnaz. But that’s hard to determine; there was a bounty that was offered. People could get a lot of money for turning someone in. And so I think Bush and Rumsfeld and the others were trying to set an example. At first they wanted people to know about Guantanamo, actually, and wanted to say, ‘If you do anything that is unfriendly to the United States this is what we’ll do to you.’

And we still don’t know who’s guilty or who’s innocent because the administration won’t let anyone have a trial in any real sense. Quite a few people have been released because their governments have put pressure on the United States to let the people out. So I believe all the British citizens have been let out and Kurnaz has been let out because there was pressure put on the German government, and the German government asked him to be let out. It’s as though law does not apply and so nobody knows what they did or didn’t do.

Seems like a pretty Kafkaesque hell; in 2000 it almost almost unthinkable that the United States would soon have a president who would say he could lock up whoever he wanted for as long as he wanted without a trial. Right. I mean, ‘unthinkable’ is probably too strong a word if you study the history of the United States because you know in other countries, such as the Central American countries or in Vietnam, the United States has been involved in torture and extra-judicial imprisonment. And of course Japanese-Americans were interned in concentration camps in World War II without being specifically accused of any crimes. But the open lawlessness of Guantanamo, the publicness of it, is an astonishing development. And if the public doesn’t rise up and resist that, it means it’s an openly fascist country, really. Where just through the word of the leader people can be taken off the street and anything can be done to them.

Given the conduct of the Bush administration have you considered taking any actions like leaving the country or renouncing citizenship or withholding taxes or anything like that? Well, I used to think about giving up my citizenship but I would say that I’ve been persuaded that it’s better to try to stay here and try to change things here. Like a lot of people I have not done enough to fight for change; I’m not satisfied with my own behavior. But yes, I do think it’s incumbent on all of us who see what’s happening to try to change the course of the ship of state.

For a long time you’ve been very outspoken politically; have you ever felt you’ve paid a price in your career or in society for your dissidence? Well, it’s helpful sometimes to think of all the many things that are operating as one big system, even though that is a metaphor that is flawed. But if you can refer to “the system,” one of the things that “the system” does to try to prevent critics from having any power is to really give us such an easy life that we become lazy and feeble. And one of the gifts that the system gives us is complete freedom to say whatever we like with hardly any consequences. Because it doesn’t really cost the system anything to do that and if it tried to punish us or restrict us we might become more vigorous and fight harder.

It's true; leading up to the Iraq war there were enormous protests, in fact there was one day that saw the largest worldwide demonstration for one event in history, and it didn’t stop anything. Yes, I was marching myself. But really, unfortunately, we are up against people who just don’t care. I mean, Nixon was quite upset when there were huge demonstrations against him but I think that people like Cheney or Bush are almost indifferent to that. I mean, I continue to do it; I only have to cast my memory back a week to a small demonstration that I participated in. But I don’t think Dick Cheney was upset about it.

In January 2003, you published in the Nation one of the most devastating critiques of America’s position teetering on the brink of the Iraq catastrophe. You wrote:

We're passengers. We're waiting. We're sitting very quietly in our seats in the car, waiting patiently for the driver to arrive. We're nervous, of course, looking out the window at the gray landscape. Soon the driver will open the front driver's side door, sit down in his seat, and take us on a trip. We're going to Iraq. We don't want to go. We know we'll be driving straight into the flames, straight ahead into the flames of hell. It's crazy. It's insane. We know that. But we're paralyzed, numb, can't seem to move. Don't seem to know how to reason with the driver. Don't seem to know how to stop the car from going. Don't seem to know even how to get out of it. Everyone's floating around in a daze. No one knows what they ought to be doing.

What do you think the real motivations were for the architects of the Iraq war? I suppose they believed that they could somehow establish a position in Iraq where they could be sure that the United States would dominate the Middle East for decades to come. They have a fantasy about nationalism and controlling the planet and at the same time they do have a realistic belief that it takes the resources of the world to sustain the American standard of living.

And of course it is true that if the world changed dramatically and, let’s say, ending poverty and stopping global warming became humanity’s principle concerns, that could lead to a decline in the standard of living in the United States, possibly a weakening of the enormous corporations that people like Dick Cheney believe in so passionately. That’s a realistic fact. So they want to dominate the planet and I suppose they thought that Iraq was a place they could easily conquer and establish a permanent bastion there. There didn’t take into account people’s rejection of the concept of empire. It’s just somehow no longer acceptable to people to be ruled by foreigners. It just doesn’t go over anymore. People just somehow can’t stand it.

Your recent performance of The Fever was really moving and it seems really relevant to the case of Kurnaz, except the torturing is not being done in some Central American country but by the United States. Do you see any parallels there between something you wrote in the early ‘90s and what’s being done now by our own government? Well, if you were studying what was going on the ‘80s and read Noam Chomsky, you are less shocked by Guantanamo than if you are just average New York Times reader. It’s obviously the School of the Americas where torture was being taught many decades ago. Torture and concentration camps were not invented by the Americans but we’re the empire of the moment. So since the 1940s the Americans have perfected techniques of empire, including concentration camps and torture.

But we’ve never had leaders who were so openly brutal and who, in a way, don’t even understand that it ought to be embarrassing; in a way, they don’t even care if people think that they’re brutal because they believe in it. And they actually think the world would be a better place if more people were afraid of them. They are, in my view, victims of wrong thinking, but they genuinely believe that the way to make the world do what you want is to be bigger and more brutal than anybody else.

In 2000 I saw The Designated Mourner at that abandoned gentleman’s club in the financial district. And then in light of what happened the following year the play seemed to capture the essence of the dramatic change that was about to take place in America. Well, what people said to me about that play at the time was, ‘What was all that violence in your play about? That was a metaphor for something; what were you trying to get at?’ I said, ‘It’s a metaphor for itself! You don’t see any violence out there?’ But it is true that a couple of years later the play didn’t seem so metaphorical and mysterious; I mean it never did to me but I was not that shocked about the blowing up of the World Trade Center because I had some familiarity with the things that go on in other countries. If you read and travel a little bit you do see that violence is one of the main ways that people struggle in the world. There is a struggle out there because, you know, the resources are going to flow in one direction or another.

Last year I had the opportunity to interview Scott Elliott and later Josh Hamilton, who worked with you in Hurlyburly. We all shared a mutual admiration for your work and I asked both of them if Wallace Shawn was working on a new play and they couldn’t say. So do you know the answer to that question? [Laughs] Well, I have been working on a play for ten years and I finally did finish it so I’ll just come right out and admit that. Yes. I don’t really believe in saying, ‘Oh, yes, I’m working on blah blah.’ Because, you know, that’s what you were doing if you finish it. If you don’t finish it and it is just a pile of scraps then really you were boasting without any real justification. And if you knew how to finish it then you would have already finished it. Obviously if you’re still working on it there must be something that you can’t figure out about it. So it’s better not to boast about until you have figured it all out and you have something to present.

I’m guessing you don't want to give a synopsis or anything but can what can you reveal about it? What's the title? Yes, I’ll give you title but I’m not going to give you a synopsis. The title is Grasses of a Thousand Colors. So if everything works out in an ideal way perhaps in 2009 it will become a public event in some way.

Okay, I’m very glad to hear that. I’m shocked, but it’s true.

Have you seen any theater lately that you liked? I saw Caryl Churchill’s play a couple weeks ago and it was absolutely wonderful.

The new one, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? Yes. You caught me at a good moment to ask that question. When people ask me if I’ve seen anything that I really liked recently I usually just sit there. But this one was easy.

I just rented Southland Tales the other night; I missed it in the theater. That was really remarkable. It certainly is.

I didn’t even know you were in it. Do you watch your films after they come out; have you seen it? Absolutely! I saw that one three times! I really enjoyed it.

Is that one of those roles that the director specifically had you in mind for? I must say that he did.

Tickets for Friday night’s event, held at 7 p.m. at the South Court Auditorium Humanities and Social Sciences Library [5th Avenue and 42nd Street], are sold out. Extra tickets will be sold as they become available; wait list sign up will start at the ticketing tables at 6 p.m.