America mostly knows Wallace Shawn as the cranky Vizzini from “The Princess Bride,” but for many New Yorkers he remains half of the cult movie “My Dinner with André” and a provocative playwright with politics very much on his mind.
His stage work is hard to get right, though, and this new revival of “The Fever” at La MaMa is unlikely to convert many new fans to the cause.
Shawn wrote “The Fever” in the 1980s, and started performing it in people’s apartments in 1990. This commitment was typical of his political engagement at the time: Both 1985’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” and 1996’s “The Designated Mourner,” which the Public Theater’s reviving in June, deal with the seduction of fascism — the Reagan years were tough on Shawn, a textbook example of the left-leaning intellectual.
“The Fever” was made into a 2004 HBO movie starring Vanessa Redgrave, an almost hilarious case of typecasting as the story reads like an extended attack of liberal guilt and self-loathing.
Now it’s Romania-born Simona Maicanescu’s turn to play the unnamed narrator, a well-off New Yorker who finds herself in a war-torn country and reflects on how her very existence reflects economic inequality.
A petite woman with elfin features, Maicanescu makes a tentative entrance via the aisle.
“I go there?” she mutters to herself, pointing at a spot on the bare stage. She places herself into a tiny little square that looks drawn up in chalk, and doesn’t budge from there the entire show.
As staged by the Swedish playwright/director Lars Norén — though hardly known here, he’s a star in Europe — this production tests both performer and audience. For nearly an hour and a half, Maicanescu speaks in a soft, almost childish voice, cracks the occasional flirtatious smile, and moves only her hands. They constantly flutter, like nervous birds, as our traveler justifies her status with lines like, “I made the money, and so I have it, and I can spend it any way I like.”
Gradually, the character becomes obsessed with the role she plays in a global unequal system, without doing anything to change it. This even makes her physically ill.
Shawn’s stream-of-consciousness script is often shaggy and unwieldy, but where it excels is in its angry dark humor. That last aspect is almost entirely missing from the show, softened by Maicanescu’s sing-song diction and her accent — she usually works on French stages.
By the time she concludes that “the life I live is irredeemably corrupt. It has no justification,” the sentiment barely registers. That’s not going to help the revolution, is it?