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Also this issue: Model Image Tere O'Connor Dance Shut Up and Dance 11 Macbeth Line Dance Monsters, Mickey and Mozart The Game Is Ova The Crucible |
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March 13-19, 2003
theater
A man sits in a fictitious hotel room. An actor sits in a real hotel room.
We, too, sit in the real hotel room, watching the actor watch us watch him while the man the actor is pretending to be watches himself as though he were a fictitious character, a man who cannot lay down his burden of lies but yet spends an hour and a half telling us/himself about the need to do so and the impossibility of doing so.
The Fever, by Wallace Shawn (Aunt Dan and Lemon, My Dinner with Andre), is an exhausting monologue -- taxing for the actor (the estimable, restrained Pete Pryor) and taxing for the audience, as we easily sympathize with this charming, open, serious-minded man who is in a poor country where the rebels have just blown up the electrical towers. No histrionics, no hysterics, no panic, no rants: just an account of a man trying to take responsibility for his moral life.
He reveals the change that has come over him since he began to explore the basic socioeconomic assumptions that he was a happy person, that life was "precious," that experience is a cocoon of civilized pleasures: art, parties, theater, film, friends, restaurants, wine. He decides to go on a trip to visit "poor countries" and thus begins the dismantling of his entitlement, and of his fundamental belief in his own decency. With that comes a "sour rotting lovelessness" that results in the long self-debate about what one -- "anyone of good will and culture" -- should do about poverty, inequity, human misery, cruelty and violence. All he wants, he says, "for God's sake, is a little consolation, a little solace."
The Fever is a difficult play -- in content and in structure -- and it requires an audience willing to pay close attention, willing to feel the assault on the very privilege of our being in the theater. Shawn's language creates superb images in the details (the tiny rustles of paper released when a present is opened, a face "like a cake that has been soaked in rage"), but it is at times preachy and unrelieved by humor or by another character.
Brat Productions is known for site-specific work, and artistic director Madi Distefano has made a particularly clever choice here: The spectacular view of the city just beyond the gauzy curtains heightens our own burdensome sense of privilege, as does the fineness of the tiny orchid plant on the table. Pryor, under Matt Pfeiffer's very minimal direction, creates a moving portrait of a person undergoing a terrible ordeal very quietly.
The Fever
Through March 30, Brat Productions at the Radisson Plaza Warwick Hotel, Penthouse Suite, 1701 Locust St., 215-413-0975
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