The Fever (Evergreen original)
by Wallace Shawn
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Book Summary Information
Author: Wallace ShawnEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-01-27
ISBN: 080214070X
Number of pages: 68
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of The Fever (Evergreen original)
Book Review: A Monologue to be Performed
Summary: 5 Stars
Author Wallace Shawn wrote "This piece was originally written with the idea in mind that it could be performed in homes and apartments, for groups of ten or twelve".
This provacative, creative and revelatory monologue is based on several periods of participant observation by the author in Central America. He witnessed much suffering as a result of poverty and oppression. But after his return to the States, he had difficulty describing his emotional reactions to his Central American experiences. Hence, he wrote this play as a vehicle to get across the felt environment as opposed to a sanitizing description-by-words. And it works.
The narrator of Shawn's monologue is a Yankee traveling in a third world country who becomes violently ill and nearly incapacitated on the floor of his hotel room's bathroom. From the view of his bathroom floor, he recounts his privileged life and his eventual realization that his standard of living is maintained at the expense of others less fortunate than him. The narrator narrates that "We need the poor. Without the poor to get the fruit off the trees, to tend the excrement under the ground, to bathe our babies on the day they're born, we couldn't exist. If the poor were not poor, if the poor were paid the way we're paid, we couldn't afford to buy an apple, a shirt, we couldn't afford to take a trip, to spend a night at an inn in a nearby town". Certainly an Amishman, Mennonite or other farmer might feel that Shawn has gotten carried away in his delirium because most farmers are thankful that city people can't be bothered with growing their own food.
In conclusion, the reader (or listener) is left feeling that poverty and oppression is not merely unjust, but is bothered if he or she does not to do something about it. An intriguing dramatic method to promote social action.
Summary of The Fever (Evergreen original)
Wallace Shawn's The Fever is the winner of the 1991 Obie Award for Best Play and soon to be a film starring Vanessa Redgrave. While visiting a poverty-stricken country far from home, the unnamed narrator of The Fever is forced to witness the political persecution occurring just beyond a hotel window. In examining a life of comfort and relative privilege, the narrator reveals, "I always say to my friends, We should be glad to be alive. We should celebrate life. We should understand that life is wonderful." But how does one celebrate life ? take pleasure in beauty, for instance ? while slowly becoming aware that the poverty and oppression of other human beings are a direct consequence of one's own pleasurable life? In a coruscating monologue, The Fever is most of all an eloquent meditation on living a life with conscience and action in ethical relationship to others in the world.
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