Essays

Essays
by Wallace Shawn

Essays
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Book Summary Information

Author: Wallace Shawn
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-09-01
ISBN: 1608460029
Number of pages: 186
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Book Reviews of Essays

Book Review: "A Reluctant Mystic"
Summary: 5 Stars

It would be a wonderful world if we were all more like Wallace Shawn. I attended a conversation between Shawn and author Bruce Wagner at West Los Angeles' Hammer Museum of Art on a recent Wednesday evening promoting "Essays." It was an outstanding pairing, though it ended somewhat abruptly due to the discomfort caused by an outburst from Wagner in response to insulting comments from the audience. Still it was a memorable evening, resembling an alternate version of "My Dinner With Andre," with Wagner playing the antithesis of Andre Gregory.

In this version Wagner dubbed Shawn "the reluctant mystic." The discussion that ensued that evening was an appropriate preface to reading (or rereading since most have been previously published) Shawn's outstanding collection of essays. These show Shawn to be a "reluctant mystic," a man of faith.

Shawn writes about art, theater, politics, family, and sex. Noam Chomsky basically sums up Shawn's thesis in their interview when he states, "It's simply very easy to subordinate oneself to a worldview that's supportive of one's own interests." How to un-subordinate, or figure out how to live ethically in subordination, is Shawn's dilemma and our own. "Well," Shawn claims, "the first thing we have to do is face it."

I am very comfortable with the way Shawn faces the world. It's an elegant stance of thought and noble ideals. As Shawn notes in his one-person performance, "The Fever," many are well acquainted with interior identity, intentions. "We're prisoners of self-love." It is the exterior identity, what we actually do, which is less familiar. It is also less interesting and lovable. "We understand the crimes of others but can't understand our own." Even if we understand them we can't endure the correction.

Shawn confessing to being a "killer," his awareness of his interior identity, did not cause discomfort to those attending the Hammer presentation and it will not greatly disturb those reading "Essays." Such interior awareness is soothing. The audience discomfort was caused by Wagner's non-apologetic stance that more honestly depicted the way most in that privileged audience live, or "do."

A telling moment that evening, which caused the crowd to grumble in disgust at Wagner, but reflects the tenor of "Essays," arose following Shawn's recollection of sitting in a restaurant and wondering why he was being served and not the other way around. Wagner rebutted that perhaps the waiter was quite happy in his role as server, implying that those serving and those being served were serving each other. The audience, perhaps on their way to an exquisite meal in Westwood, found this untenable.

Shawn reluctantly admits to walking down the street in foreign lands comforted by the knowledge that the United States military can overpower any nation's forces. We are perhaps comforted by believing that those who serve must envy those they serve. If not all the efforts those who read Shawn's essays have made to become the served have been for naught. If such musings are of interest "Essays" is an outstanding read. I left it thinking what a wonderful world it would be if Wallace Shawn could be like Wallace Shawn.
The Fever (Evergreen original)

Summary of Essays

?Full of what you might call conversation starters: tricky propositions about morality... politics, privilege, runaway nationalist fantasies, collective guilt, and art as a force for change (or not)...It?s a treat to hear him speak his curious mind.??O Magazine

In these beautiful essays, Wallace Shawn takes us on a revelatory journey in which the personal and political become one.

Whether writing about the genesis of his plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon; discussing how the privileged world of arts and letters takes for granted the work of the ?unobtrusives,? the people who serve our food and deliver our mail; or describing his upbringing in the sheltered world of Manhattan?s cultural elite, Shawn reveals a unique ability to step back from the appearance of things to explore their deeper social meanings. He grasps contradictions, even when unpleasant, and challenges us to look, as he does, at our own behavior in a more honest light. He also finds the pathos in the political and personal challenges of everyday life.

With a sharp wit, remarkable attention to detail, and the same acumen as a writer of prose as he is a playwright, Shawn invites us to look at the world with new eyes, the better to understand?and change it.

Praise for Wallace Shawn and Essays: 

?Lovely, hilarious and seriously thought provoking, I enjoyed it tremendously.??Toni Morrison

?Wallace Shawn writes in a style that is deceptively simple, profoundly thoughtful, fiercely honest. His vocabulary is pungent, his wit delightful, his ideas provocative.??Howard Zinn, author, A People?s History of the United States

?Wally Shawn?s essays are both powerful and riveting. How rare to encounter someone willing to question the assumptions of class and the disparity of wealth that grows wider every year in this country. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing.??Michael Moore, film-maker

?Wallace Shawn?s career as a playwright has been uncompromisingly devoted to proving, again and again, that theater is an ideal medium for exploring difficult matters of great consequence. The qualities that make his dramatic work so challenging, startling, unsettling, sensual, mind-and-soul expanding, so indispensible, are equally in evidence in the marvelous political and theatrical essays collected here. The basic faith of politically progressive people, that human beings are full of decent impulses perverted by political and economic malevolence, is in Shawn?s writing held up to the liveliest, sharpest scrutiny imaginable; not, as in so much reactionary art, to shift blame from oppressor to oppressed, or from artifice to Nature, not to insist that we?re innately, inescapably incapable of change, but rather as a scrupulous accounting of the slippery ethics, dream logic, fear-ridden resistance to progress, disturbing desires, of the greatest problem confronting all our hopes for a better, transformed world: Us, the actors in our collective drama. His essays are without sentiment and entirely resistant to the easy comforts of despair. Complexities are rendered delightfully plain, obfuscations are unsnarled and illuminated, clarity and rational thought are organized to plumb mysteries, and mysteries are respected and celebrated. Shawn?s language, his unmistakable, original voice, felicitous, is unadorned, elegant, immediate, true. He?s also a brilliant interviewer, as everyone who?s seen My Dinner With Andre (which is just about everyone) knows. And, of course, he?s very funny.??Tony Kushner, playwright, Angels in America

?Wallace Shawn is a bracing antidote to the op-ed dreariness of political and artistic journalism in the West. He takes you back to the days when intellectuals had the wit and concentration to formulate great questions - and to make the reader want to answer them.??David Hare, playwright

Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor (Star Trek, Gossip Girl, The Princess Bride, Toy Story). His plays The Designated Mourner and Marie and Bruce have recently been produced as films. He is co-author of the movie My Dinner with Andre and author of the plays The Fever, The Designated Mourner, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and Grasses of a Thousand Colours.

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