Search results for ""author wallace shawn""

At Ted's instigation, the old gang gather once more at the almost legendary club The Talk House. Ten years on and presided over still by the kindly Nellie, there's the same genteel atmosphere, familiar drinks, unchanging special snacks. But the era of Walter Barclay is long gone.A playwright, a composer, an actress.The possibility of a pleasant night.Evening at The Talk House by Wallace Shawn premiered at the National Theatre, London, in November 2015.

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In a gloomy hotel room, after reading compulsively about murders, Shawn tries to sleep but is troubled by meandering thoughts and memories that follow one another in an apparently random chain. Ultimately a point of view begins to emerge. In a world dominated by privileged killers, how should we live? What world do we want? Having recently passed the age of seventy, before which he found it difficult to piece together more than a few fragments of understanding, Shawn would like to pass on anything he's learned before death or dementia close down the brief window available to him, but he may not be ready yet.

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“Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking.” TONI MORRISON "Endlessly curious, playful, and subtle." PANKAJ MISHRA SLEEPING AMONG SHEEP UNDER A STARRY SKY is a collection of essays written over the course of the last thirty-five years. Shawn seems to start from the premise that the world ought to be a place where all of us can lie around on cushions writing letters and love poems to each other on multi-coloured paper, as perhaps the women and men of the eleventh-century Heian court in Japan were able to do. Why do we not inhabit a world in which beauty, sensuality, and the adoration of other people, other beings, and the natural world are our principal preoccupations? Why, instead, are we obsessed with a joyless struggle for supremacy over each other? Why have we invented races and nations? Is what we call “civilization” the precipitating cause of our destructiveness and viciousness, our sadism, our love of murder? Shawn himself grew up as a child of privilege and has devoted his life to aesthetic pursuits and hedonism. Has the life he’s led provided him with any sort of valuable vantage point from which to view the world, or has he simply been a parasite? As he himself feels that the answer isn’t clear, a certain self-questioning underlies these essays, along with a nagging doubt about whether we’re right to insist that all of our different qualities and aspects cohere into a single “self.” If the self is simply an illusion, how can we understand “ourselves”? And if we don’t understand ourselves, what conclusions should we draw from that?

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A daughter is tied to her brilliant father by a passionate bond. But then she is drawn towards an appealing man whose taste in cultural forms follows a disturbing path. The Designated Mourner is a harsh and poetic play about the pursuit of beauty in brutal times.The Designated Mourner premiered at the National Theatre, London, in April 1996.

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A thrilling friend of her parents casts a spell over a young girl. A study in the glamour of brutal ideas.Susie, he's not just an individual like you and me - he works for the government. It's as if you were saying that you and I are so nice every day and why can't our governments be just like us! But you know the whole thing, Susie - you and I are only able to be nice because our governments - our governments are not nice! - so that if you see me putting this spoon in my purse, you don't have to wrestle me to get the spoon back, you can just pick up the phone and call the police. And if there are people attacking our friends in Southeast Asia, you and I don't have to go over there and fight them with rifles - we just get Kissinger to fight them for us.Aunt Dan and Lemon was first produced by the Royal Court Theatre, London, and the New York Shakespeare Festival and received its world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in August 1985. The play was revived at the Royal Court Theatre in May 2009.

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A traveller falls ill in a poor country and plummets into a feverish self-examination.But something's been hidden from me, too. Something - a part of myself - has been hidden from me, and I think it's the part that's there on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw out the window of a passing train. The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life - my behaviour, my actions - now that's a slim little paperback, and I've never read it.The Fever was first performed by the author in an apartment near Seventh Avenue in New York City in January 1990. It was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991, and at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1997. The Fever was revived at the Royal Court Theatre in April 2009.

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'There is a quality in Shawn's writing - imaginative verve, quiet intensity, a sort of puritan sensitivity or a blend of them all.' The TimesThis first collection of Wallace Shawn's work contains plays from the seventies and eighties, including Aunt Dan and Lemon, described by Frank Rich in the New York Times as 'the most stimulating, not to mention demanding, American play to emerge this year'.Aunt Dan and Lemon'A mordant comedy for those who really listen in the theatre... A playwright of astonishing originality and veracity.' New York TimesMarie and Bruce'A play that sees, hears, smells and tells more about the way we really live now than any American play in years... Wallace Shawn is a true original, one of the most deeply seeing, sharply writing playwrights we have.' NewsweekThe Fever'A profoundly engaging and provocative journey through the awakening of a pampered man's conscience.' NewsdayA Thought in Three Parts'Wallace Shawn's highly acclaimed play is a trio of playlets exploring the theme of sexual isolation, each in a very different dramatic style which still retains the author's quite distinctive ability to combine colloquialisms with highly poetic writing in a quirky, sinister way... nasty, hilarious and quite riveting for all the right reasons.' Time Out

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A collection of beautiful essays in which Wallace Shawn takes readers on a revelatory journey where the personal and the political become one. Shawn often focuses on contradictions, even when unpleasant, and finds humour in the political and personal challenges of everyday life. AVAILABLE FROM JUNE 2009.

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