Results tagged “wallaceshawn”

It's been nine long years since Wallace Shawn's strange and haunting masterpiece, The Designated Mourner, was staged in a crumbling old gentleman's club on Wall Street—the perfect location for a play that so vividly illustrates how pampered complacency enables brutal tyranny. Now Shawn is finally back with another play—well, sort of. His Grasses of a Thousand Colours premiered at the Royal Court in London earlier this year, but a production in New York, his home town, is far from assured.

Wallace Shawn—known to some as America's most radical playwright, to others as that guy who goes, "Inconceivable!" in The Princess Bride—recently rapped with the Times about his umpteenth wave of pop culture recognition; this time thanks to his recurring role on the adolescent wish-fulfillment series Gossip Girl. Shawn, who as an actor has played everyone from Chekhov's Vanya (Vanya on 42nd Street) to an alien leader (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), insists he doesn't know why anyone should be surprised by his appearance as Blair Waldorf's mother's boyfriend: "It is a little bit puzzling, because I don’t think of myself in any way. I just seem like a kind of blob or a blank to myself." But he says he does feel qualified for the part because of his experiences as a teacher at Trevor Day School, where he encountered “many Gossip Girl characters in the making. The parents on the show really remind me of some of the parents I met then. I literally do think, ‘Oh, where have I seen that before?’ And I say, ‘Oh, it was in reality.'"

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.

ART: Duke Riley brings his latest exhibit, After the Battle of Brooklyn: East River Incognita II, to Magnan Projects. Starting tonight and showing through December 22nd, the works imagine New York during the Revolutionary War and "interweave historical and contemporary events with elements of fiction and myth to create allegorical histories. His re-imagined narratives comment on a range of issues from the cultural impact of overdevelopment and gentrification of waterfront communities to contradictions within political ideologies as well as commerce and the role of the artist in society and at war."

It’s been said that one of the defining characteristics of punk rock – besides the anti-establishment attitude and DIY ethos – is the urge to transcend the barrier between the performer up on stage and the traditionally passive spectator. In that sense, there are few artists in today’s theater more punk than Wallace Shawn – which may come as a surprise to those who know him as “that guy” from such movies as The Princess Bride and Clueless.

MOVIE: Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island is...a real movie! With a plot and everything! Wanna hear it?: "Jack Jones, a pledge in Zeta Alpha Rho Fraternity must battle homophobia and a killer clown during his fraternity's Hell Night." Sounds pretty deep.

Wallace Shawn has long enjoyed a fruitful career as a character actor in mainstream movies (Clueless, Princess Bride, Chicken Little). He also happens to be one of the world’s most significant dissident writers. His plays The Designated Mourner, Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Fever – to name just a few – have garnered much praise (and controversy) for their unflinching examinations of brutality. Shawn’s plays are political but not polemical; through his writing he questions everyone’s complicity – liberal intellectuals especially – in the horrors unleashed out of sight and out of mind.

Voyage, Tom Stoppard’s first installment in the three play Coast of Utopia series, crowned a month of breathless Times hype with a gushing Brantley rave. But good old Tommy “Can’t Stop; Won’t” Stoppard – famous for his perfectionism – still ain't satisfied. According to Michael Riedel, Stoppard has been staking out Lincoln Center during intermission and confronting any audience member with the temerity to jump ship during the (nearly) three hour tour. According to Riedel, the exchange usually goes something like this:

The new hit off-Broadway production by the New Group of Hurlyburly is reportedly transfering to Broadway, we are especially glad that we had the chance a few nights ago to see it at the intimate Acorn Theatre at 42nd Street's Theatre Row complex.

There are certain quirky and intriguing people in the media, whose awe-inspiring creative output makes them just the sort of people whom you'd love to be accidentally sitting next to in a coffeehouse, just so you could evesdrop on their conversation. Or better yet, hear them present on their most recent works in an auditorium for a nominal fee.

Liz Penn, Writer/TV Critic

Josh Aiello, Author