[In late February 1992, I interviewed
actor and playwright Wallace Shawn (b. 1943) on the telephone. I was doing research on avant-garde stage
director Leonardo Shapiro and his Shaliko Company for a profile to be published
in The Drama Review in 1993 (“Shapiro
and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony,” vol. 37, no. 4 [T140] [Winter 1993]).
[Shawn was a friend of Shapiro’s from their student days at New York University’s School of the Arts (now the Tisch School of the Arts) and he followed and supported Shapiro’s work from the beginning in the early 1970s. Shawn was working on an MFA in the Graduate Acting Program of SOA from 1966-68 while Shapiro was studying directing in the undergraduate division from 1966 to ’69 for a BFA. At the same time, Shawn was working with André Gregory (b. 1934) at his theater troupe, the Manhattan Project, which would become a model for Shapiro’s own Shaliko Company in the following decade.
[I never got to meet Shawn; our only contact was that phone interview, though the actor and writer was instrumental in many of the early steps in Shapiro’s artistic life (see my eight-part post “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” [16, 19, 22, 25, 28 April, 1, 4, and 7 May 2023]).
[As I’ve recorded elsewhere on Rick On Theater, the first service Shawn rendered Shaliko was to broker the connection between The Shaliko Company and Joseph Papp’s (1921-91) New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater). The playwright praised Shapiro’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken to Gail Merrifield, Papp’s wife and the director of play development at NYSF, in 1974 and Merrifield got her husband to see it. Papp offered Shaliko space at the Public Theater on the strength of that production—only the third troupe to have been accorded such a privilege at the time.
[After Measures moved to the Public, Shaliko produced two more shows there. After the third one, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, Shapiro disbanded his company and decided to try his hand at freelance directing, starting in December 1976 at the Public with The Youth Hostel, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Shawn.
[Shawn mediated Shapiro’s return to direct Youth Hostel, overcoming Papp’s reservations by affirming “that he really believed in” the director. Papp had called Shawn “my favorite writer.”
[The 1976 workshop presentation before subscribers and invited guests was a test to determine if Three Short Plays (as the bill was called in this production), set before, during, and after sex, was suitable for a full staging at the Public. The one-acts were never put on the NYSF schedule because their explicit portrayal of sex was too seamy for Papp.
[(For the record, the other two plays were Summer Evening, directed by Wilford Leach [1929-88], and Mr. Frivolous, directed by Lee Breuer [1937-2021]. The three plays are published as A Thought in Three Parts [the title under which they were successfully produced in London in February 1977] in Shawn’s Four Plays [Noonday Press, 1998].)
[Shawn later described the workshop as “a disaster,” and the NYSF stage manager’s reports indicates that many spectators left during the performance. The direction and performances were generally commended and not considered to be at fault for the reception, however, and the forty-five-minute Youth Hostel cemented the life-long friendship between Shawn and Shapiro.
[In 1983, Shapiro, having tried unsuccessfully to relaunch Shaliko, tried again. Shawn had brought a new play, The Arbor by Andrea Dunbar (1961-90), from England where it had been produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1980, and Shapiro approached Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), who agreed to let him present the play at La MaMa E.T.C., beginning Shaliko’s association with that East Village theater.
[Max Stafford-Clark (b. 1941), the director of the Royal Court, had earlier successfully directed the Shawn one-acts in London under the umbrella title A Thought in Three Parts after they were rejected by Papp. The production of The Arbor attracted a great deal of attention for its raw power and honesty, so Shawn brought it back to the U.S. and showed it to Shapiro.
[The Arbor by Andrea Dunbar had its U.S. premiere at La MaMa from 9 September to 4 October 1983. It was generally well received, with Frank Rich of the New York Times asserting, “[T]his modest play . . . is honest and at times affecting in the most plaintive way. We not only get a completely unsentimental portrait of Andrea, but also a streetwise sketch of a rugged social environment . . . .”
[What I think was the last
professional collaboration between Shawn and Shapiro was in 1990. Shapiro, who’d been appointed artist-in-residence
at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1983, directed a production of
Shawn’s 1985 play Aunt Dan and Lemon
at Trinity in April. Out of this
association with the school, Shapiro launched the Trinity/La MaMa Performing
Arts Program in 1987, an advanced theater-training course he administered from
the East Village theater and for which Shawn conducted a seminar.
[Shapiro resigned from Trinity/La MaMa in 1992 and closed down Shaliko the next year. He retired to a mountain cabin in New Mexico, near Taos where he’d lived among the hippie communes doing guerrilla theater from 1969 to 1971. Diagnosed with bladder cancer, Shapiro died in 1997, a couple of weeks after his 51st birthday.]
“THE NEW YORKER”
by Susan Dominus
[Susan Dominus’s profile of actor-playwright Wallace Shawn appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 22 February 2026. The online version, “Is Wallace Shawn the Only Avant-Garde Artist Who Gets Stopped in Times Square?,” was posted on 8 February (and updated 9 February; note bracketed correction below).]
The playwright and actor Wallace Shawn remains possibly the only avant-garde artist to draw tourist attention in Times Square.
After I had lunch with Wallace Shawn, a lifelong New Yorker, he readily accompanied me across town, although it was a frigid Sunday in December and much of the city’s usual post-snow slush had hardened into ice. [The snowfall occurred on 26-27 December 2025, delivering about 4.3 inches of snow to Central Park.] Shawn, who’s 82 and famously small in stature, wore a generic black parka and generic black boots. Before leaving the restaurant, he’d shoved onto his mostly bald head a dark gray wool cap, notable only for a few moth holes. He looked, in other words, like any other city native who could expect to travel invisibly through the streets, except that when we reached the theater where I was meeting my niece, a ripple of jittery energy instantly traveled down the row of people waiting to enter. The two women behind my niece in line nearly jumped when he approached, staring at him in open adoration and amazement. Shawn, who’d already been stopped twice that day by giggly fans, smiled back automatically; such encounters are routine — pleasant enough but also common enough to have little emotional valence.
Shawn showed up in Times Square that day like a one-man tourist attraction, a symbol of the city’s telegenic renderings on shows like “Sex and the City” [2004] and “Gossip Girl” [2021], both of which have featured him as a romantic savior to glamorous Manhattan women in need of a decent (or, really, any) man. He’s also played a New Yorker in such consummately New York films as Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979) — in which he was also cast as an unlikely Lothario — and in the film he wrote and starred in with his friend and colleague André Gregory, “My Dinner With André” (1981), an art house breakout hit in which both men depict versions of themselves as artists. Shawn has earned what he always refers to as a “bourgeois lifestyle” by playing the ultimate funny valentine: his mouth a little weak, his figure less than Greek, all of it superseded by an intelligence and originality that the camera captures at close range.
Although the 30th anniversary of the film “Clueless” (1995) has revived interest in Shawn’s performance as an avuncular teacher, the part for which Times Square tourists may most likely know him is Vizzini, the Sicilian would-be hit man of “The Princess Bride” (1987). His most famous line, “Inconceivable!,” turns up several times in the movie, and Shawn’s wildly varied delivery — distinctively nasal and lisping one moment, cocky and debonair another — made it a kind of meme long before the internet would spread it even further. It’s an earworm of an exclamation — nerdy, beloved, handy. People still shout it at him on the street as he walks by. Even at a Harvard reunion (he attended the school as an undergraduate), teenage children of his classmates called it out as they passed him, something to be reckoned with for someone who once told an interviewer that his goal as a human being, since childhood, was “to be taken seriously.”
Shawn, who describes acting as “this funny thing I took on late in life,” considers himself primarily a playwright — one who has, as he puts it in the introduction to the published version of “My Dinner With André” [Grove Press, 1981], “generously shown on the stage my interior life as a raging beast.” In “Our Late Night” (1975), an urbane party devolves almost immediately into chatty conversations about fornicating and farting; someone vomits loudly offstage, and a man casually tells a woman he’s just met that he’d like to have sex with her, and in what fashion. In 2013, he performed, along with the actress Julie Hagerty and others, in his play “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” [Joseph Papp Public Theater, Off-Broadway, 28 October-1 December 2013 ], in which he envisions a world where a consumable solution to a global food shortage has the disturbing side effect of making humans (even more) obsessed with their genitalia, with other taboos cast aside and recalled as quaint relics of a more uptight time.
Shawn’s works often have the feel of profane fairy tales in which humans aren’t so much transformed into animals but revealed as them. His own creative compulsion seems to lie in exposing his characters’ secrets, their shameful, if universal, instinct to root around for pleasure and comfort, whatever the cost — be it others’ emotional anguish or, on a more global scale, the suffering of the oppressed. Next month, his new play, “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” [opened 5 March 2026], will open off Broadway at the Greenwich House Theater. Shawn, whose own family was defined by a longstanding secret, continues to explore what’s hidden in “Moth Days” — but the play represents something of a departure, a move toward material that is more personal, less pungent or political. Gregory, who is directing it at 91, says it’s a play that has a deceptively simple quality. “The tip of the iceberg is what the audience sees, but the bulk of the iceberg is invisible and underwater,” he says. “So underneath this play is a lifetime of writing and a lifetime of being involved in the world.”
As if in counterpoint, Shawn is also reprising, two days a week at the same theater, his role in the one-person play “The Fever” (1990), which features a member of the privileged class who comes to feel revulsion at the violence inherent in maintaining the global status quo. “‘The Fever’ is a very harsh, cruel depiction of bourgeois people,” he says. “In ‘Moth Days,’ I have a fondness for those people, even a love for them.”
For all his recognition as an important figure in the theater and as a writer (Shawn has published two books that showcase his essays and been honored by PEN [worldwide association of writers] for his playwriting), he is perceived by millions of people, and reminded almost on a daily basis, that he will forever be best known for his screen work, some of which he did decades ago over the course of just a few weeks. It occurs to me, as we talk over lunch, that it might be alienating for Shawn to have his exterior persona — the powerful associations people have with the look of his face, the shape of his body — mean so much to those he regularly encounters, when it’s often because of a piece of work, released years in the past, about which he feels relatively little. “It’s unbelievably strange!” he says, leaning in across the table. “Unbelievably strange!”
The strange, the unsaid, the contrast between our outer and inner selves — these have been Shawn’s preoccupations since he was a precocious and mildly rebellious child of the Upper East Side. When he was 13, he and a friend went to see the first American production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1956) at the Helen Hayes Theatre. The play, which O’Neill [1888-1953] wrote toward the end of his life, is his most autobiographical, the story of family members in pain facing the secrets that made their trajectories both bearable and awful; it’s about sons stumbling in their efforts to build lives beyond the shadow of their outwardly successful father, a man grappling with his own heavy disappointments. [James O'Neill (1847-1920) was an Irish-American stage actor, famous largely for one role: Edmond Dantès. the title character in a stage adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo.]
The play opened something in Shawn, who didn’t know back in 1956 that he would end up a playwright and actor; he just felt he’d been given a view through a porthole to a universe in which what was real could be expressed and lived, loudly and publicly. “I was thrilled by its truthfulness,” he tells me. “It stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I’d still swear by that. I felt, ‘This is true. Everything else is fake. This is really what’s going on.’”
Shawn announced to his parents that they had to go see the production, which they did — and then pointed out to them afterward that the family in the play was much like their own. “My mother said, ‘What do you mean, dear? I’m not a dope fiend!’” he recalls. “But yeah, there was a secret in my family.” As he says this, we’re sitting in the back of a restaurant near Lincoln Center, although Shawn asked that I not reveal the place to protect his privacy. “I didn’t know it,” he continues. “I had no idea. But kids always know it at some point. And I know I thought, ‘This was my family.’ My mother made fun of the idea. My father wasn’t saying anything. He got it. Of course! He thought, ‘Wallace is picking up something.’”
Shawn and his brother, Allen [b. 1948], who is five years younger, lived their lives in a state of what could be considered true dramatic irony: They were conducting themselves according to certain premises, the falsity of which everyone around them was well aware. Their father, William Shawn [1907-92], the second editor of The New Yorker, was married to their mother, a former journalist, Cecille Shawn [1906-2005]; but he also had a long relationship with Lillian Ross [1918-2017], a writer for the magazine, and was even raising her adopted child with her. The affair was known to many who worked at The New Yorker; it was known, for most of its duration, to his wife. But their playwright-actor son, who lived at home in his mid-20s, didn’t find out about the relationship, somehow, until some three decades after it started, when he was almost 35, after a friend who assumed that he and his brother knew made mention of it.
“A lot of people grow up in families where there’s a secret,” Shawn says. “Fewer grow up in families where there’s a secret that a lot of people know but the kids don’t know. That’s more unusual.”
Unlike many of his characters, Shawn speaks slowly and with many pauses in the service of sentences that ultimately emerge perfectly formed. He is also polite and courtly and at great pains not to offend, so much so that one fears inadvertently violating whatever code of etiquette is obviously almost sacred to him. So private that he asked me not to reveal what he ate throughout our meetings, he nonetheless has written a play whose broad outlines, and even some poignant details, are flagrantly autobiographical. “Moth Days” — those fluttery, flyaway moments before death, as one of the characters imagines them — unfurls the story of a long-running extramarital affair told, in a series of monologues, from the points of view of four people: a father who’s a famous author, played by Josh Hamilton; a son, a philosophizing and wounded searcher played by John Early; a long-suffering mother, played by Maria Dizzia; and a cultured, bookish lover, played by Hope Davis [read a review]. The pacing is slow, the mood wistful and only gently comedic. The set is minimal, as is the staging, so that the storytelling and self-reflections of the actors alone mesmerize the audience. With empathy for themselves and those who disappoint them, Shawn’s characters ponder the preprogrammed compulsions to fall in and out of love, to be overwhelmed by and then lose all desire, “to use the tiny, pitiful words that the creature uses to point to invisible parts of itself, invisible parts that grow so vast that they turn us inside out and then swallow us up and eat us,” as the son, Tim, puts it. One of the play’s most beautiful passages is not about the pain of heartbreak but about the suffering felt by someone who has fallen out of love — someone who had no control over its dwindling course but who must inevitably wreak emotional havoc on the blameless formerly beloved as a result. What’s strange about the world, in Shawn’s work, is how little examined it is for its impossible constrictions, its punishing inevitabilities.
In conversation, Shawn can be benevolent, even beaming. And yet one senses that although it would be hard to say something that would offend him, it would be easy to ask a question that would. As I delicately try to broach the parallels of the play with his own upbringing, Shawn sounds, if not quite sharp, pointed. “I had no complaints about my parents,” he tells me. His work often suggests he is interested in exploring humans’ worst instincts. But even the most venal characters in his plays often describe their fate, in ways that are almost convincing, as the culmination of factors far beyond their control or awareness. “Moth Days” not only has sympathy for a man seeking love outside a marriage; it also gives dignity and dimensionality to a beautiful woman who might have been betrayed, even shattered, but is nonetheless adored by her son for her strength and brilliance. And it reveals a son — a writer who is no rival to his father, a figure who writes sexually inappropriate children’s stories that have gained a cult following — who loves both of his parents and judges neither, even as he feels real pain.
Much of Shawn’s theater is defiant in one way or another, often refusing the conventions of the form altogether. With little direct interaction among the characters, the performance of “Moth Days” has a stillness that calls on the listener to lean in. “It really felt like these four characters were in the psychiatrist’s chair,” says Elizabeth LeCompte, 81, a founding member of the Wooster Group, who saw the play in rehearsals. “And I was the psychiatrist.”
Unlike his brother, Allen, who has excavated his family history in three memoirs in which he also details his mental health struggles, Shawn says he has never been in therapy, with the exception of several months in college when a psychology professor he admired offered to provide analysis as if it were a generous extension of his coursework. But he has little interest in exploring the psychological reasons he’s chosen to delve into this material now, at this phase of his life. The actress Kate Valk, 68, another founding member of the Wooster Group, suggested to me that in the later years of one’s life one feels drawn to more personal material, a notion Shawn dismisses. “I don’t think I could have written that play 25 years ago,” he says. “Because 25 years ago, there was too much interest in the old New Yorker and Mr. Shawn.” If anything, he adds, he wrote it now simply because he’s a different person, composed of different experiences and reflections, so that what he wrote inevitably changed over time in ways he couldn’t predict or particularly control.
In his first memoir, “Wish I Could Be There” ([Viking,] 2007), Allen, the twin of a sister, Mary Shawn, who has autism and was institutionalized, enumerates the various topics, beyond the affair, that were either secrets or unmentionable in the Shawn household: that they were Jewish, and also universally short (Wallace is 5-foot-2); that both parents saw psychiatrists; that they worried about money (their father felt trapped by his job, which he held from 1952 to 1987, but also was loath to ever ask for a raise). Allen, an accomplished composer, turned to music, in which everything is felt but nothing explicitly said, to express himself; his older brother, it seems, chose for his creative outlet a medium that would allow him to say everything that he thought should be said, no matter how shocking or, as some critics have found, morally heavy-handed. “The World’s a Mess, and It’s All Your Fault,” is the headline of a New York Times review of the 2007 production the New Group did of “The Fever.”
[Allen Shawn’s two other memoirs are Twin: A Memoir (2011), which focuses on his relationship with his autistic twin sister, and In the Realm of Tones: A Composer's Memoir (2025), which is about his career and life as a composer and pianist.]
The actor Ethan Hawke, who had shared a dressing room with Shawn for six months during their run of David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” off Broadway in 2005, was so incensed by the damning review of “The Fever” that he wrote a (never published) letter to the editor defending Shawn’s play, which Hawke, now 55, said inspired his mother to overhaul her life to start volunteering overseas. “What ‘The Fever’ does for many of us is to articulate and validate the ambivalence we feel about the privileged lives we lead,” he wrote. “The liberating effect that ‘The Fever’ had on my mother was to make what she wanted to do seem logical — not heroic or saintly but logical.”
Hawke’s comments made me think back on a moment at the theater to which Shawn had accompanied me. Among the many details of his life that he’d asked me not to include was the name of the play I was seeing at that time with my niece, since he had decided to see it as well. His concerns were less about privacy than about a policy of do no harm. What if I mentioned the play, he explained, and then asked him on the record what he’d thought about it? And what if he didn’t like it or didn’t say one way or the other? Some actors’ feelings might be hurt. And what if he did like it? Someone else, some other friend performing in a different play at the same time, might be hurt that he hadn’t found a way to say a few kind words about that performance.
As we stood outside the theater, he delivered the request firmly, smiling gently up at me, but with some implied apology and resignation, as if other people’s feelings were an inconvenience that required effort to manage but that must nonetheless be navigated carefully, much like the icy streets we’d just traversed. At first I thought his request was overly cautious, even neurotic; but when I played it out, I saw that it had a rock-solid logic behind it, the kind that comes only from someone with a rare and complicated gift for empathy, for understanding the deep vulnerabilities of anyone who puts themselves onstage trying to show what it is to be human.
Before he would find his way to writing plays, Shawn first majored in history at Harvard (an institution he despised, as he was sure to tell its alumni magazine), traveled to India to teach English, then studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, fully intending to become a civil servant. “If you’d met me back then, you’d have thought, ‘This is a very serious person,’” Shawn says, contrasting that first impression with the way he’s so often perceived now — as the funny guy from the movies. Instead, while still at Oxford, he started writing plays, for no reason other than that he felt compelled to. He began mailing them to figures he admired; eventually, he showed them to the writer and critic Renata Adler [b. 1937; author, journalist, and film critic], a family friend who felt the plays — imaginative, literate, at times very witty — had originality and, as she recently recalled, “a music to them — a purity.” She introduced him to Gregory, by then a noted avant-garde director, who shared her opinion. Others did not. In 1971, Peter Brook [British; 1925-2022], the experimental-theater director, whom Shawn revered, agreed to read his work, only to offer a short but withering critique that Shawn can quote word for word more than half a century later. “To make any worthwhile comments about someone’s work, you have to have at least some sympathy with it,” Shawn recites. “But” — and here he slows down, as if to savor the feel of the shiv in his creative soul — “I remained on the outside of your plays.” Those words may still haunt him, but they didn’t sway Gregory (whose self-confidence perhaps surpassed even that of Shawn) from starting to direct and mount his plays, while some of the actors in his group, the Manhattan Project, were arguing with one another over whether to do the work.
Shawn’s early playwriting career landed him in a period of exhausting debt and mindless clerical work, the toll of which he described to the reporter Don Shewey [b. 1959] in a 1983 Esquire profile. “The fact is,” Shawn said back then, “most of my time is spent racing around trying to answer half of my phone calls, doing half of my errands, paying half of my bills, just desperately trying to keep up with the minimum of life. And I have to fight and kill, I feel, to get any free time to do a little writing of my own. I feel I have to be a monster, a murderer, to get 15 minutes for myself!” Although Shawn’s own financial life would gradually improve in the years following the release of “My Dinner With André,” his introductory lines in that movie reflect the contrast between his cosseted early days as a 10-year-old artist in the making, the scion of a literary great, and his sometimes grim life as a working artist: “Now all I think about is money,” his character complains. That he wasn’t more successful as a playwright by his mid-30s came as something of a surprise to Shawn, who’d assumed — maybe given his upbringing, his education or some innate conviction — that his work would be widely embraced by that point in his career.
Shawn occupied an unusual class demographic in New York at
the time. Even as he had close friends who shared Thanksgiving with the
Kissingers or were thriving in his father’s employ at The New Yorker, he
himself was so broke he considered driving a cab, and his girlfriend worked as
a waitress. Shawn may have experienced a somewhat hardscrabble life, but he
nonetheless was living in a period when an experimental artist could still
scrape by in Manhattan — when the arty productions he and his friends mounted,
even with small audiences, still got reviewed by critics at major papers, so
that it felt like the work, too, had a legitimate home in the city.
His writing led him to film and television work after Woody Allen’s
casting agent saw him in his first onstage New York performance, at the Public
Theater in 1977, in Machiavelli’s “The Mandrake” (1524). Shawn had translated
the script, and played the part of a rambling, comical servant only because the
director [Wilford Leach] had an instinct he’d be good. A memorable bit part as
Diane Keaton’s sexually gifted ex-husband in “Manhattan” resulted in interest
from other casting agents, which led to recurring roles on “The Cosby Show” [1987,
1989, 1990, 1991] and “The Good Wife” [2013, 2014, 2015].
[Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) was an American diplomat, political scientist, and politician. He served as the 7th National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975, followed by being the 56th United States Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977. He served under presidents Richard Nixon (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74) and Gerald Ford (1913-2006; 38th President of the United States: 1974-77).]
The work as a character actor, which started in his mid-30s, allowed Shawn to pay off his debt. He says that he and his partner, Deborah Eisenberg [b. 1945], the acclaimed short-story writer, never particularly minded the shabbiness of the humble life they were leading in Chelsea (the neighborhood where they still live). The money he started making as an actor was important mostly because it meant that he never had to choose, he says, between “having a pleasant bourgeois lifestyle and writing my plays. I never had to face any kind of a crisis where anybody said, ‘You know, the problem with you is the type of plays you write — couldn’t you possibly write more enjoyable plays? You would be able to lead a bourgeois lifestyle then!’” His role in culture, high and low, is unique, as if an actor like Jane Lynch only did film and television work so she could continue to choreograph well-regarded but little-seen productions of interpretive dance.
It wasn’t only his educational pedigree and upbringing, of course, that gave Shawn his confidence. Though much of his early work was panned, he was right to think it was worthy of being admired and eventually valued in the canon. “I was wrong until I was 70 or something,” he says. “Then I began to feel that more people respected me.” Eisenberg, he adds, will no longer put up with his complaining that he’s underappreciated.
And yet even Shawn still has to hustle to make the art he cares about. When some funding for the “Moth Days” production fell through, he used all of his considerable social capital to find actual capital. “I went around asking everyone I knew, ‘Do you know anyone who has a lot of money?’” he tells me. (Scott Rudin [b. 1958] [and Barry Diller (b. 1942) are] producing the show.) Shawn sounds proud that he wasn’t squeamish about the topic of money, as his father had been — that he’d brought his own power to bear in order to bring this story of loving, flawed humans to light.
As is typical for Shawn and Gregory, who spent some 15 years rehearsing their adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder,” which became a 2013 film directed by Jonathan Demme, rehearsals happened sporadically over a year and a half, rather than mere weeks. Shawn showed up for all but one of them. Early, 38, says the experience was easily the most meaningful of his career. “This play has had the effect of making me embarrassed by most of my other performances,” he tells me. “There’s a difference between memorizing your lines and knowing your lines.”
Gregory’s talents as a director do not lie in the notes he gives, says Shawn, as there are almost none; his gift is in the exquisite warmth and receptiveness, the aliveness, with which he observes. Early says that Shawn brought the same quality to rehearsals, so much so that the intimacy was almost uncomfortable at times. “It’s like you’re staring face-to-face, making eye contact with the playwright, as you’re performing, as if you’re delivering the performance directly to him,” he says.
When Donald Trump was re-elected, Shawn had momentary doubts about the timing of such a personal play. “I wrote this during the Biden era!” he tells me. “At first I was upset because I thought, ‘I really would like to have written a play that explicitly cries out against the murderous regime of Trump and the evil that has happened.’ But now I’m feeling, ‘Well, this gang of people who have clustered around Trump — and Trump himself — they’re violently opposed to sympathy for other human beings.’ So to do a play that is, in a way, subtle, and that deals with suffering human beings somewhat compassionately . . . it becomes political.” Even the act of putting so much care into a play was, as he perceives it, a rebuke to those in power. “The whole enterprise of creating an artistic work is of value. I think the way we’re doing it is sort of intelligent. And that makes a statement in this bizarre time we’re living in.”
So much about the world seems not just cruel or senseless but bizarre to Shawn that it doesn’t seem entirely coincidental that “inconceivable” is the word with which he has become so strongly associated. (In fact, the word turns up in one of his lines that he wrote in “My Dinner With André”: “It’s inconceivable that anybody could be having a meaningful life today.”)
On a Reddit thread in which Shawn participated in 2022, someone asked if it ever bothered him when fans made jokes to him or just shouted one word out at him as he walked by. “I’m sure they mean well,” Shawn wrote back, “but nobody likes to be reduced to something smaller than what they really are.” Another person on the thread countered that, to him, it was far more than a throwaway comedic line; as a lover of Shawn’s work, he saw it as “that tiny little crack that opens into a world of wonder.”
Shawn had just seen a Wooster Group production of Richard Foreman’s [1937-2025] “Symphony of Rats” last spring [27 March-8 May 2024] when someone in the audience stopped to ask for a photo. “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this in the citadel of art,” he demurred; he seemed embarrassed, in front of his fellow avant-garde actors, to be caught in the role of pop-culture celebrity. “He’s a snob,” LeCompte says lovingly, as if no higher compliment could be given. Nonetheless, Valk urged him to embrace the recognition. “Oh, go on,” she told him. “Give the people what they want.”
And in that moment, at least, he did.
[So, what’s wrong with Grand Nagus Zek? He doesn’t get a mention? (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 7 episodes: 1993-99)
[Susan Dominus, a journalist and professor, has been a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine since 2011. She was part of the winning team for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and for reporting on sexual harassment in the American workplace and in 2024, she won a National Magazine Award for an article about menopause.
[Before her current position at the Times, Dominus worked as an editor for eight years at magazines including Glamour, The American Lawyer, and New York before switching to reporting and writing. She freelanced for the Times Magazine and other outlets before joining the Times staff in 2007 to write the “Big City” column for the Metro section.
[Dominus graduated from Yale University where she is currently a lecturer. She is the author of The Family Dynamic (Crown Publishing, 2025).]
