Wallace Shawn, Playwright

Photo: Katie Sokoler/Gothamist

In the book you interviewed the poet Mark Strand and you asked him whether it bothers him that a million people don't revere him. Does it bother you that your plays are, perhaps, less known than your acting? Well, so what? I mean, it does bother me, but we can put that down as a trivial, sort of pitiful concern that people who know me or have to live with me hear me complaining about. I take myself seriously as a writer of plays, not necessarily because I should, but I took myself seriously when I was six years old, you know, that's just how I was raised and so I take my plays seriously and I don't like it if people aren't interested in them or have a patronizing attitude towards them. I get upset about it.

I've achieved a certain popular success as a comical actor and on a bad day, I suppose if someone comes up to me and says, "Hey, you're the inconceivable guy!"—because that was a word or catchphrase that my character used in the popular film that I was in. When that person defines me that way, and says you're the "inconceivable" guy, I may have a momentary twinge of thinking, "Wait a minute, I think I'm the guy who wrote that play, the one you've never heard of!" I don't deny that on a bad day, I might have that reaction. Although most of the time if someone comes up and says something like, "Oh, I really enjoyed you in that movie that you were in," or "I saw you on Gossip Girl and I really enjoyed it," that's just as pleasing to me. I'm not thinking about the fact, "Why aren't they complementing my plays!" I mean, why would they even know about them? I'm pleased if they saw me on Gossip Girl and enjoyed it. I'm delighted.

You also ask Strand if he felt different than when he was 30. You said you did. How so? Well at that time—and he described something similar very eloquently. A roller coaster works due to a mechanical device that pulls you up to the highest point, and then in terms of the number of feet that are covered, that's only a small proportion of the ride, but by the time you've been pulled up to the top of the highest point, then the machine lets you go over the first hill and then you go over all the smaller hills. But you need the machine to pull you up to the top to get the thing going. After that, there's no machine, you're just rolling.

And so to get yourself to be a writer, you have to have outrageous self confidence. You have to convince yourself that what you're doing is definitely great. So, that's what I felt when I was 30. I felt, "The plays that I'm writing, there's no doubt about it, they're definitely magnificent works and anybody who doesn't think so is wrong!" And I don't think I would have been able to really get myself to do those things if I hadn't felt that. But now, I am more prepared to believe it if someone were to say to me, "Well most writers think they're great, but most writing's not great, so you're probably one of the ones who's kidding himself and your work probably will be forgotten, most people's is, and your work probably is not that great." I wouldn't put up a tremendous fight about it. I would say, well, we'll see. I don't know. After my death, we will discuss it.

Speaking for myself, I can say that seeing The Designated Mourner on Wall Street was absolutely unforgettable and the best experience I've had—I can't say in a theater, because it wasn't in a theater. [Laughing] That's so great, you must have been about 11 years old at the time.

Hmm, no, I think I was 24 or something. But many years passed between that and Grasses of a Thousand Colours. Did that feel like a lot of time for you or did it feel like a natural period of time between finishing plays? My dear fellow, you'll be shocked to find how fast 10 years feels. You know between 55 and 65, it's just unbelievable. I mean it's unbelievable. It seems like 15 minutes. I mean it just goes by so fast. So no, it didn't seem like a long time. Most of the things I've written have been over a period of five years. This was over a period of 10 years, but it seemed like three years. So for me, subjectively it didn't seem longer than the others.

I read that it's going to be presented by the New Group. Is that actually happening? Well, I think that there are a lot of—there are 11 things that have to happen before a play can actually be put on. A lot of people have to agree on a lot of things and someone has to pay for it, so you know, we are still in the stage of... I want the play to be done in New York and so does Andre [Gregory, director] and I hope it'll be possible.

Were you pleased with the London premiere? What do you mean?

Were you satisfied with the production? Were you happy? It was our production, yes! I think it's an incredible production. Incredible! And you know, I was in the production, so you could say that I have not seen the production, but I've seen a lot of pictures of it and I've seen the other actors and if you like it, it's great. Some people are never going to like it, they're not going to like it at all, and some people are not going to get it, and they won't like it.

Did you read the reviews? Mmhmm.

Some of the reviews were very good, and then of course there are mixed opinions about things. The writer for the Telegraph wrote something about, how when he arrived home, he couldn't look his own cat in the eye without blushing. Which to me seems like a compliment because maybe it revealed something about himself that he'd been ignoring. Well, the play has to do with the relationship between human beings and the natural world. And maybe that writer for the Telegraph was—Freud said there's no jokes, or something to that effect, and maybe he [the writer] was shaken in his view of the relationship between man and nature, I don't know. Let's hope so.

Speaking of people reacting, I've always marveled at how your work just evokes such extreme reactions in people. Joe Papp called you one of the most important dramatists of our time, and then there's the critic John Simon, who seems to have such massive contempt for your plays. Why do you think that he in particular has responded so negatively and viciously? I don't know much about him. I've read all the horrible things he's said about me, and Andre and I even participated in a panel with him at the Telluride Film Festival. We were surprised to find that the organizers had put him on the panel along with us! And he said very hateful things. I don't know that much about him, and if I did, it would be rude to speculate. Obviously he would say, about me, "Well, I have contempt for him because he's phony!" He would say of me: "I would have contempt for him because he's a person with no talent who nonetheless has foisted himself on the public, and I'm exposing him as a fake."

So then I, if I knew a lot about John Simon, I suppose I would say, well the real reason that he doesn't like me is "blah blah." Which would be a pointless exercise. I don't know why he doesn't like me. I mean, it is beyond the normal bounds and it crosses over into a kind of personal hate. One of the critics in London expressed a kind of personal hate or contempt. Some people feel that it's been very easy for me, that I've had a very easy life, and haven't had to struggle as most people do. I think they feel that I had every advantage. From their point of view, I had connections, I knew people who knew people. And I was given every advantage, every privilege; you know, private schools. I mean, those things are all true; I have had it easy. But that doesn't bear really one way or another on my writing. But yes, some people may feel a particular sense of revulsion against me because they think I've had such an easy time in life and haven't really had to struggle as most people do.

Do you wonder if there's a political element to it, too? Because I remember in Harold Pinter's case, for instance—it seemed like there was a vindictiveness to the critics who were opposed to his work and I always wondered if there was a subtext of it really being about his politics? Well, politics has to do with how society is organized and who makes the decisions and who makes the power, and your feeling about all of that is going to come out in what you write, probably. A lot of Pinter's early plays were not in any way directly political, but his feelings about authority come out loud and clear. Yes, people who, for instance, have a high regard for the status quo, let's say, are just instinctively going to hate writing that seems to be sneering at the status quo or denouncing it even if it's very indirect. And every play fits somewhere on that spectrum. One can think of many Broadway plays that one has seen that accept certain assumptions and reject other certain assumptions. There are jokes that might be, from the point of view of the conscious mind of the writer, just silly jokes. They say, "Oh well, I just thought it was funny." But if you really analyze it, it's a joke that's at someone's expense, or it's a joke that assumes certain things about the way society should be. A critic picks up on that and likes it or doesn't like it.

In the book you talk about collaborating with this voice that "comes through the window," and from what I've read, it seems like that's also how Pinter and other writers work. My question is: How do you balance trusting the mysteriousness of that voice through the window with also deciding what to eliminate and edit? My writing usually does have two pretty distinct stages to it. It's oversimplifying it in a way, but there's a first stage where there's raw material being collected. That is like the timber that is brought into the factory and that's coming from the unconscious or from God knows where it comes from. I'm not making it up, it comes from somewhere. And it's being delivered to the factory and then there's the much more conscious process, I mean a completely conscious process where you make something of that. You turn the wood into a chair, and some of the wood is discarded as scrap and some is useful for the making of the chair.

Are you sometimes tempted to make chairs that would appeal to a greater mass of Americans, like the movies you appear in, that would be seen by more people? Um...yes! It's just, it's not that obvious which of the things that I normally do I would have to eliminate in order to do that. Yes, I've thought about it forever, and maybe someday I will. I don't know how long I'm going to be alive, but someday I will write something that more people could appreciate. I mean obviously there are limits to my ability to do that because, let's say, the most popular films are written in a kind of vernacular jargon that I don't use in my daily life and I wouldn't know how to imitate it. Most humor that is tremendously commercially successful I couldn't write, really. I wouldn't know how to. Because it is alien to me.

But I don't think it's ridiculous to think that I could write something that more people would like. It's never going to be as successful as the action movie that takes in $100 million dollars in a weekend. Because I don't know the line that the person says before he pulls the trigger of the gun and kills somebody, the comedic line, the insult or whatever, that makes the whole audience full of people laugh hysterically. I wouldn't know how to write that. Because it's just not funny to me. I mean I don't find those lines funny, but millions of people do. And one of them who does is the author of the line. I mean, you can't do that unless you're an enthusiast.

It's also interesting to see your plays be made into movies. And the DVD of Marie and Bruce finally came out. What was your impression of that? I loved the movie of Marie and Bruce. I think it's a fabulous movie. And I think that it's a tragedy that it was not theatrically released. It should have been. I mean, that's my belief about it.

Don't you think a live performance of a play loses something in translation when it goes to screen? Yeah, usually, but this was not a film of a play, it was a film based on a play. Just like a film is based on a novel or something. So, yes, if you just film a play, 99% of the time it is awful.

At one point in the book you talk about presenting a film you've worked on and everyone you collaborated with cared a lot about this project, and then someone gets up and asks, "What's the point?" Do you think that art and film has a point, or has to have a point? Well, I think that's an unbelievably shallow way the guy looked at the film. I don't know how much more shallow you can get than that. In my interview with Mark Strand, he speaks so eloquently about how you might read a poem and basically he's saying it doesn't have one point. If it's a really good poem you can walk around it, you can turn it upside down, you can memorize it and you can read it. He said, "dozens of times and you're still seeing different things in it," and it doesn't just say one thing.

It's like, if you go to a zoo and you see an elephant, you don't ask, well what's the point of the elephant? It's just an amazing creature, and you could have a million reactions to the elephant. And you know, a piece of a film or a play or a book or a painting. You know, it's an object for contemplation. It is something that you can enter and become involved with it. Why do we have friends? You could say, what is the point of your friend Bob? It's not that he has a point, it's not a point, this is what life is, that we can get to know him and have a relationship with him, and learn from him and it's not about it being a point.

Back in the realm of politics—because half of the book addresses that realm—have you been disappointed by Obama thus far? I assume you voted for him but that might be totally baseless. Well, so far he has not altered the fact that our country is run by a tiny elite of wealthy people and the United States and the people in it are shaped to benefit them, and Obama has not changed the fact that the U.S. is a militaristic society. He said in the campaign that he thought the war in Afghanistan was a noble enterprise. God knows why, but he said it, so to say that you're disappointed that he really did expand it, and did what he said he was going to... there's a limit to how disappointed can be if you were listening.

I mean, we can't expect that one man would become president of the U.S. and within 6 months the entire planet would be put on a different course, that's just not possible because things happen for reasons. They don't happen just because, you know, Dick Cheney is not a nice fellow. And then they don't turn upside down because Barack Obama is a nice fellow. But he's only been in office for a few months. Personally, I don't feel I know him... because I don't know him! I don't know any politician. I don't know them. We don't meet them. We know what we've been told about them, and we aren't allowed to know them in the way we might know our friends or loved ones.

On the evidence of what I've seen of him, a controlled portrait, I feel warmly toward him, which I haven't felt toward any president since I was in my 20s. Definitely not. As a matter of fact, I felt repelled by most of them, and he's the first that I've felt this way about. I feel very warmly towards him. When he spoke in Cairo, I was deeply moved by what he said, God bless him. But you know, he has not turned the ship of state around. And let's say the Dalai Llama had been elected the President of the United States, how much could he change the course? It's not obvious. I mean, there are reasons why things happen, it's not just good people and bad people, and this is what Karl Marx was trying to explain to us, and he was right about it.

So a good person plus the entire public could change things. If we all figured out how to press him to abandon this ludicrous idea of fighting a war in Afghanistan, maybe it could be stopped because maybe in his heart of hearts he doesn't want to fight it but he's doing it for certain reasons. He's a human being in a way that I recognize unlike most politicians, I believe that. But you know, it's up to us, it's not up to him really. It's a certainty that things won't dramatically change just because of him. There's a possibility that if the public pushed him in the good direction, he plus the public could make some beneficial changes. There have been changes in history that have been for the good. They did end slavery. At one time, food was not inspected by the government and then people demanded that and certain leaders "went along with it" and they did do that. And then the public I guess stopped paying attention and you know, Reagan and Bush put people in the food industry in charge of inspecting the food, and it stopped being as well-inspected.

Of course now the public is so deeply divided at these reforms for health care. Just today, a pro-health care reform advocate had part of his finger bitten off by an anti-health care reform advocate. It seems like it's culminating. Yes, there are a lot of these tragically deluded people who vote and demonstrate against their own interest. That's tragic. But let's not forget that basically it's the people who are making the money from the status quo that are using these tragically deluded people. They wouldn't be biting people's fingers off if the energy were not coming from the companies. I mean if nobody was going to lose money from a change, no fingers would be bitten. There wouldn't be any.

You know it's a complex mechanism to explain how it gets from the millionaire in the boardroom saying we've got to stop this and the poor, impoverished, old person who thinks he's had his own idea that Obama's plans will lead to socialism or God knows what. There's a mechanism that connects those two. And it's complicated to explain it... And it's tragic because they're not making the millions. Those deluded people are not making the millions that the CEO of the health insurance company makes, and yet they're working for him for free, to help him make more money. It's heartbreaking, and they're arguing in favor of measures that would give them less good care. It's just heartbreaking.