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Drawn to Shawn
Actor David Shapiro has been in several of playwright Wallace Shawn's works. In The Designated Mourner, he is at home in the role of Jack.
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 11, 2001
Actor David Shapiro has made a specialty out of being in plays by Wallace Shawn. In 1998, Shapiro was at Gorilla Theatre in Shawn's The Fever, a monologue by a well-to-do American liberal who falls ill while traveling in a Third World country and is tormented by guilt and self-loathing over his privileged life.
It was one of the most provocative stage productions in the bay area that season.
Now Shapiro, who lives in Chicago, is back at Gorilla in another Shawn play, The Designated Mourner.
"Wally basically wrote The Designated Mourner in response to The Fever," Shapiro said. "The Fever, in a way, is sort of an indictment of the liberal intelligentsia, and The Designated Mourner is trying to say that these people may be kind of annoying and all that, but once they're gone, it's going to be a bad thing."
Shawn writes of a world he knows well, his late father having been the longtime editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn. He is not only a playwright but also a ubiquitous character actor in movies. He is widely known from the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre, which he wrote and starred in with director Andre Gregory, basically playing themselves in a philosophical conversation at a restaurant.
In 1997, Shapiro was in the North American premiere of The Designated Mourner by Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, playing Jack, one of three characters in the play.
"I don't know how to articulate exactly what it's about," he said. "My character was married to Judy, and her father is Howard, a poet. Obviously somebody is dying because it's called The Designated Mourner. The play is a love story, and it's also a story about the threatened extinction of art and culture in a so-called advanced society. It also deals with questions of highbrow and lowbrow, but I'd be loath to say there's a plot to this play."
Director Mike Nichols made a rare acting appearance when he played Jack in a London staging and a subsequent movie. Shawn himself played the part in a celebrated New York production last year.
At Gorilla, Shapiro is both playing Jack and directing a cast that also includes Claude Dorge and Martine Friesen. Shapiro previously directed the two in a production in Winnipeg, with another actor playing Jack.
Because of his familiarity with the play, and because The Designated Mourner is basically told through three monologues addressed to the audience, with little direct interaction among the characters, Shapiro believed he could both direct and act.
"I wouldn't normally recommend that a person try to act and direct at the same time, but because it's all these monologues for the most part, it is doable. Sometimes I wish that there was somebody I could bounce things off of, like the director, but since that's me, I bounce things off the other two actors."
The New York production of The Designated Mourner, directed by Gregory, was performed not in a theater but in a one-time gentlemen's club. John Lahr, theater critic of the New Yorker, called it "one of the most memorable evenings of theatergoing in my life."
"There was a lot more bells and whistles going on," said Shapiro of the New York show. "It was an interesting production. It was very different from what I'm doing."
Shawn, a fan of Shapiro's work, might attend the Gorilla production. "He's very interested in coming to see it," Shapiro said. "The only thing that could prevent him is that I think he's working on a movie right now. He knows the dates. If he comes, he comes."
Shapiro is going to be in another Shawn project, an adaptation of Ibsen's The Master Builder, directed by Gregory. He will play an apprentice to a famous architect, played by Shawn, in a production that has been rehearsed off and on since 1998.
"We've gotten together about four times for about two weeks at a time over the last couple of years," he said. "It's sort of like theater camp. We get together, we work and then we go our separate ways. That's the way Andre likes to work. He doesn't like to work with any kind of deadline. When it begins to look good, maybe he'll start to think about showing it to people."
A similar sort of production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, with many of the same people as those in The Master Builder, was documented in the movie Vanya on 42nd Street.
It was probably appropriate that Shapiro, who turned 45 last week, celebrated his birthday in rehearsal for a Shawn play.
"I love his plays politically and aesthetically," he said. "Like all of Wally's plays, The Designated Mourner is a commentary on society, but I think really great art does not tell you exactly how you're supposed to think about something. It's more like submitting it to you and saying here's all the data, you figure it out, you decide what this means to you."
THEATER PREVIEW
The Designated Mourner by Wallace Shawn opens tonight and runs through Jan. 27 at Gorilla Theatre in Tampa. Tickets: $14 and $17. (813) 879-2914.
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