[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 indicate 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” [Martin Grable: 2004] and “Gossip Girl” [Cyrus Rose: 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 [Essays (Haymarket Books, 2010); Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky: Essays 1985-2021 (Europa Editions, 2022)]
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.”
[The Wooster Group is a not-for-profit, experimental theater company based in New York City. The troupe’s performance style is highly innovative, often employing audiovisual techniques such as interactive video, live stream, recorded sound, and pre-recorded video into their work. Rejecting traditional psychologically realistic acting, the company favors a more technical, athletic, and detached approach.
[Though the group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte (b. 1944), formally took its name in 1980, it spun off from Richard Schechner’s (b. 1934) The Performance Group (1967-80) during the period from 1975 to 1980. The company’s base is the Performing Garage, the home of Schechner’s troupe, on Wooster Street (from which it took its name) in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. The Wooster Group has won nine Obie Awards, six Bessie Awards (for dance and performance art), multiple grants from the Carnegie Corporation, and the 1985 National Endowment for the Arts Ongoing Ensembles Grant.]
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” [Jeffrey Engels: 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991] and “The Good Wife” [Charles Lester: 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 [1828-1906] “The Master Builder,” which became a 2013 film directed by Jonathan Demme [1944-2017], 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).]
