the playwright

Wallace Shawn is one of the most controversial playwrights of contemporary American theatre. His involvement with theater began in 1970 when he met Andre Gregory, who has since directed several of his plays. As a stage actor, he has appeared mostly in his own plays and other projects with Gregory.

His early plays, such as Marie and Bruce, portrayed emotional and sexual conflicts in an absurdist style, with language that was both lyrical and violent. His play A Thought in Three Parts caused a minor uproar in London in 1977 when the production was investigated by a vice squad and attacked in Parliament due to allegedly pornographic content. In later years his plays – including Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner and The Fever - have become increasingly political, drawing parallels between the psychology of his characters and the behavior of governments and social classes.

In an essay for the London Guardian that appeared in connection with his 2009 play Grasses of a Thousand Colours, Shawn posited that the mainstream media presented "the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate world - a world not ideal, but still good enough – [the newspapers are] committed to telling its readers that many things will not happen, because the world is under control, benevolent people are looking out for us, the situation is not as bad as we tend to think, and while problems do exist, they can be solved by wise rulers.”