What a treat to read the interviews with playwrights Wallace Shawn and Tony Kushner in the Summer 2012 issue of the Paris Review. In Anyone’s Cockatoo's dotage we have shied away from literary magazines, having been scarred by a newsstand-bought copy of The Three Penny Review a couple of years ago (our subscription had long lapsed). We tried our best to make sense of the articles, the fiction, and the poetry but came up blank. Worse, we didn’t recognize any of the contributors; the names could just as easily been the enrollment list of an international pre-school for how ignorant we were.
But we digress.
Anyone’s Cockatoo was fortunate enough to see Wallace Shawn perform his one-person play "The Fever" on stage during the Los Angeles Festival of Arts. Shawn recounts that the play was “pretty brutally denounced” by critics, but what were people fed a diet of bland, conventional plays to make of this millefeiulle of a monologue?
The Fever’s narrator is recounting his experience in an unnamed country that, as he’s holed up in his hotel room, is going through some vague kind of turmoil. Vague to the narrator, one should add; the people and victims on the street know exactly what’s happening. It had been happening to the oppressed since forever.
He remembers his privileged childhood, how coddled he was. He thinks of his current life where he holds the Right Opinions and so forth. And that all of it means nothing.
Shawn says in the interview, “I was trying to explain to all the nice people out there how it could be possible that from our point of view we’re so nice, and we’re so lovable, and we’re so cute, and so sensitive, and yet from the point of view of people who are weak and powerless we are an implacable, vicious enemy.”
Not an idea any American – critic or not – would be eager to lap up.
There is a line in the play that we’ve remembered all of these years – decades – later. Gene, a friend of the narrator, is a proud holder of Wrong Opinion. In today’s currency maybe some appalling Limbaugh-Fox Commenter-Tea Party Congress critter amalgam. The narrator has an epiphany – he realizes that his desires for what he wants (a certain kind of coffee, a comfortable life) are more a part of his identity than the lovely charm he has, the Right Opinions he holds.
“I’m no better than my friend, Gene”, he admits sadly.
We can laugh at what one commenter called the “failfest” of the Republican National Convention last week-- the sociopathic lying, the full flowering of Obama Derangement Syndrome, the desperate attempt to palm off rotten goods to the American public. Even so, as Anyone's Cockatoo makes our way around town, seeing and passing people hauling all of their possessions in trash bags, loons with matted hair and nasty clothes, the thought “I’m no better than my friend, Gene" resonates and indicts.
It should serve as a spur to action.
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Tony Kushner (Angels in America) is, of course, much better known than Shawn (although some people may recognize Shawn from his many character actor roles over the years).
Anyone’s Cockatoo read some snarky, shark feeding frenzy criticisms of Kushner’s latest play, 'The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures."
We concede the title is gaggy. We also admit we haven’t seen the play; let's hope it's a line in the play that's supposed to test the audience's gag reflex.
Would just comment, though, that his interview reads lively and, yes, intelligently. Kushner is passionate about Herman Melville (!), recounts his studies with a professor who had studied under Bertholt Brecht, and cites Proust on the topic of writers’ fears. Maybe that’s typical water cooler chitchat for the sophisticates who tore apart the play; I don’t know. I’ll just say that here in Hooterville, where strip mall hair salons announce “Moe Hawks” and menus offer “Ice Tea”, the Paris Review interviews with Mr. Kushner and Mr. Shawn were a delicious summer escape.
