![]() ![]() ![]() Wally's imagination is completely distinctive. Speaking of an earlier piece, A Thought in Three Parts, David Hare says that its central section, which dramatises an orgy, "is the only successful piece of pornography in the modern theatre" - stage directions call for 19 orgasms to be shared among four characters - "and it's also sexy and very funny. Many of Shawn's plays point to a similar interest. I mean, personally, I only mention my dick as frequently as I do because, to be absolutely frank, it interests me, and to be perfectly honest, it's just about the only thing that interests me. So you see, for me, the way things are now still seems astonishing - I mean the fact that people talk about their penises and vaginas in public, at dinner parties. But it is unlikely that any devotee of Toy Story would connect Rex the dinosaur with lines such as these, from Shawn's new play, Grasses of a Thousand Colours: "Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard."Īlthough he had not been in the neighbourhood for some years, Shawn was clearly recognisable to its residents, including those under the age of 15. "But not the soup," he said, switching to theatrical mode. He suggested sharing a variety of starters. After an email exchange in which he disclosed his financial disarray, his cat allergy, his unease in the mornings and moodiness after dark, he emerged into an unseasonably mild afternoon, settling himself at a corner table in a Broadway restaurant with his back to the crowd. He lives with the short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg in an apartment in Chelsea, near the Hudson river. Short and bald he may be, with what have been called "toby-jug features", but at 65 he is attractive, humorous and convinced that the unorthodox theatrical direction he has chosen is his true path. In person, he scarcely lives up to the actor who earns his wages. As one theatrical website puts it, Shawn has been "in constant employment as short bald comic relief". More recently, he has had a cameo role in the TV series Gossip Girl. He has also popped up in Toy Story – as Rex the nervous dinosaur – The Incredibles and Woody Allen's Manhattan, in which he played Diane Keaton's former husband. He has appeared in more than 70 films, including My Dinner with Andre (1981), which he co-wrote with his longtime collaborator Andre Gregory, and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, in which he took the title role. Writing is his calling - he has written about a dozen plays, some of which remain unperformed, and has translated works by Ibsen and Brecht – but acting gives him a living. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn't seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset." He, too, leads a double life. "When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things," Wallace says, "and that they weren't expressing their true feelings. For one thing, William Shawn was involved in a 40-year affair with the New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross – something his sons did not learn until they were grown up, whereupon a chorus of whispers became coherent. Allen's book, Wish I Could Be There, focuses on his own immobilising phobias, and on the reticence and deceit that programmed family life. Wallace and Allen are the sons of William Shawn, the legendary editor of the New Yorker between 19, and his wife Cecille. We had an adaptation of Paradise Lost that lasted for four hours. "One of the puppet shows was about the conflicts in the Congo, another was about the private life of Wittgenstein. ![]() Wallace Shawn is tickled at being reminded of them, and nods to the suggestion that he has been exploring that side of things in plays ever since. In a recent memoir of family life, Wallace's brother Allen described these early trespasses on the theatrical world as "shows that explored the dark underbelly of life and tore the mask away from genteel society". A s a child living on New York's Upper East Side in the early 1950s, Wallace Shawn mounted puppet shows for the entertainment of parents and friends. ![]()
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