review Early on in "The Fever", Wallace Shawn's travelogue through the guilt of privilege, the narrator launches into a deliciously detailed recollection of a Christmas gift he received as a child. It was a large box. And inside that box was a smaller box. And inside the smaller box, an even smaller one. And so on. Watching "The Fever" unfold is much like opening boxes within boxes, which Karin Williams' fresh and imaginative staging delivers smartly in wrappings alternately plain and bold. Seizing upon the timeliness of the Kosovo incursion, Williams presets her show with taped excerpts from radio call-in programs and NPR newscasts of the escalating conflict that segue seamlessly into Shawn's opening "in a poor country where my language isn't spoken." The narrator (Bryan Bevell) is hunched over a toilet in a shabby hotel bathroom, alternately puking and re-evaluating his bourgeois existence. His doe-eyed, dollar-book Marxism is so glibly transparent, your immediate reaction is to scoff: hold on here. Isn't this the same Wallace Shawn who rakes in big bucks in a dumb TV show that shills for American consumerism? Sure it is. An uneasy relief washes over you. This is just another duplicitous dilettante assuaging his own guilt at our expense. The relief begins to dilute the disturbing nature of his lingering images. Just another white boy singing the blues. Then Shawn opens another box. Now the narrator is back in New York, returning from a performance of "The Cherry Orchard", scornfully unmoved by Madame Ranevskaya's plight ("This person would no longer own the estate she'd once owned...she would have to live in an apartment instead..."). Suddenly, with this connection, the perception changes. The similarities between the narrator and Mde. Ranevskaya are unmistakable; both are class-bound, self-deluding narcissists lost in rosy recollections of their pasts while remaining stridently oblivious to the collapse of their present (is Shawn's narrator most impressed with this wretchedly poor country because of the purity of its Marxist agenda? No! He's crazy about the ice cream!). Suddenly, it becomes clear that Shawn is not really preaching to the choir but rather gleefully mocking it with a sweetly derisive hymn of his own. That is, until another box is opened. In the end, there is one box left, and director Williams wisely leaves this one unopened. For this is the box between performance and audience. Shawn's theater is not of didacticism, but of dialectic, of disturbing questions posited to provoke us rather than simple answers to soothe. Appropriately, Williams keeps Bevell's narrator on a constant, evenly conversational plane while choreographing (by Carol Abney) an emotional counterpoint with three dancers (Abney with Colleen Phillips and Shannon Snyder). The trio swirls about and around Bevell, alternately taunting, ignoring, mocking; ultimately consoling him. It's a truly inspired choice in a compelling evening of theater from this exciting and challenging San Diego company. One we can carry home with us to keep in that last, unopened box.
photo courtesy the fritz theatre The Fritz Theatre, 420
Third Avenue,
|
