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Epicurus.com - The Fever
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List Price: $11.98
Our Price: $11.98
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Shout Factory
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0826663976441
Format: Live
Label: Shout Factory
Manufacturer: Shout Factory
Number Of Discs: 2
Publisher: Shout Factory
Release Date: 2006-06-20
Studio: Shout Factory
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Editorial Reviews:
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Wallace Shawn, best known for his comedic roles such as the neurotic dinosaur in Toy Story, the lovelorn teacher in Clueless, the squeaky-voiced villain in The Princess Bride, and one of two characters in My Dinner with Andre, is also a noted playwright. The Fever, a thought-provoking one-man play dealing with the issues of poverty, an unbalanced economy, and the class system, now makes its CD debut, after incarnations in other media, including an award-winning Off-Broadway play (1991), a book (Grove Press, 2004), and a film starring Vanessa Redgrave (HBO Films, 2004). The Fever’s setting is a hotel bathroom in an unspecified "poor country where my language isn’t spoken." The narrator is sick, both physically and metaphysically, and spends the next 90 minutes ruminating on the distinction between his own privileged upbringing and the unbearable poverty he sees all around him. He gradually comes to see himself as part of a brutal system in which a seemingly liberal, upper-class society can only exist on the backs of the world’s billions of nameless, faceless poor. By the close of the performance, the listener is left feeling uncomfortable, and perhaps even accountable, for the inequalities of the world. The Fever was not written to lightly entertain, but rather to provoke and enlighten.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Invaluable
Comment: Though I don't yet own this recording, I saw Shawn perform it last winter. I think Shawn is the most important public intellectual of the last twenty years. Yes, he played a Ferenghi on Deep Space Nine, but I'd probably respect Chomsky more if he did a Star Trek guest shot once in a while, too. Along with Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Designated Mourner, the Fever is one of the most successful criticisms on contemporary culture and politics that I have read. Shawn has a special talent for blending humor and seriousness. In the Fever, the most memorable is his explanation, application, and paraody of Marx's concept of "Commodity Fetishism." You'll laugh all the way through and then realize at the end that you actually understand it better. The best sort of philosophizing.
If you are really interested in Shawn as a philosopher, get the actor's edition (Dramatist's Play Service)of Aunt Dan and Lemon and read the accompanying essays. The "Hitler's Dog" piece is as good as the play itself.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I laughed, I wept, I thought, I prayed, I worked for peace and universal international compassion
Comment: This disk is pure Gospel for the oppressed presented by one of our great American intellectuals and souls.
Help your heart.
Hear it.
Love thy neighbor as thyself.
Customer Rating:
Summary: POWERFUL THOUGH SUBTLE ANTIDOTE TO TODAY'S RUSHED MONOPOLISTIC PROPAGANDA
Comment: You must hear this disk.
Recorded in Santa Fe's Armory of the Arts in 1999 it is like having a good, thoughtful, conflicted and compassionate friend come to your house for a party and sit and talk and talk about all the very important things that have been troubling him lately.
He tells us much of his concerns about the nature of self, the nature of our society, its callousness and unconsciousness and lack of conscience and morality. He tells us much about what he has seen on the other side of poverty.
Perhaps he repeats some cliches, but cleverly attributes them to others (Saying "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others" is especially poignant now, after Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 and all the revelations of GOP corruption) He makes a few interesting unintentional (?) gaffes: Would a coffee picker pass out in the hot sun while tending this shade grown berry? Perhaps in Ethiopia . . . Nevertheless his points are well-made and clear, and need to be heard carefully.
Play a few moments of this double disk set. Stop. Reflect. Ruminate. Research. Read. Reflect some more. Argue at your CD player. Replay. Research. Reflect.
Such a reading creates an awakening.
Mr. Shawn has created for our edification a carefully crafted work of art that bears continual replay. He is like a guest at your dinner party whom you do not wish to leave, but to repeat again, what was that you said about . . . And what exactly do you mean by that?
This recording is a portal to understanding, to compassion, to revolution. Not by accident is one disc red and the other black, the colors most significant to those who can remember.
Ortega has been freely and fairly elected to the Presidency of Nicaragua, for the second time (first in 1984 under careful UN observers who declared the process open adn fair and the results valid, more than they could say for the USA this millenium or for Mexico lately). Now is the time to celebrate, by playing this disc carefully, repeatedly, reflectively.
I often get the feeling while listening to this recording that I am hearing one of those very affable and earnest young priests in the mid Sixties delightfully holding a huge congregation captive and hanging on every word as he recounts these items of great import and spirituality, enlightening us and leading us on to the Gospel vision of a just society at peace. Then these pleasant young priests disappeared, or got old. Or tired. Here we have a recording that brings back the engaging sound and content of their sermons. Play it. Skip the first disk if you have short time and replay the second over and over a few times. Like Joyce-s Ulysses it bears hearing again. In fact multiple listenings only increase comprehension and reflection.
I met Mr. Shawn and Ms. Eisenberg in Managua at the time he gathered material for this piece some twenty years ago. I did not then appreciate who he is. Now I begin to. Get this disk. Good price. Infinite treasure.
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UPDATE!!!:
Please read Mr. John Lahr's EXCELLENT review of this narration in the 2/19/07 issue of the New Yorker magazine. Lahr is as ever brilliant about the theatre, and sees the briliance in Mr. Shawn's writing and its presentation. Although I somehow assumed the retching to be a reaction to the ice cream and not to the reports of actual torture of others or self.
Yes, you are right, John is HIS son, just as Wallace really is HIS son. And yet they both continue to stand in their own rights.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Liner notes
Comment: These are my liner notes from the CD package:
In 1990, playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, then 47, sat on a chair on an otherwise bare stage at the Public Theater in New York and delivered The Fever, a one-man play that explores what is going through the mind of a man as he writhes in pain and disgust, shivering through what remains of the hot night on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, in the bathroom of his electricity-bereft hotel room, in an unspecified "poor country where my language isn't spoken." For 90 minutes, Shawn's un-named character mused on his own privileged life and tried to put words to the feelings that explode when an inward-looking urban aesthete meets the brutal world and sees it for what it is--and sees himself for what he is, a collaborator against the poor. It was ugly, fascinating, riveting stuff, both the words and the performance.
A lot of people didn't get it. Reviews wielded the term "liberal guilt" like a club; at least one suggested Shawn consider therapy. I suspect the anger was a result of Shawn writing and dramatizing the sort of unpleasant truths that frighten well-off, cultured folk, the pleasant, buttoned-up crowd that, smug in its sense of its own good taste, likes to see Shawn play his neurotic "character" in art-house classics like My Dinner With Andre and, subsequently, Vanya on 42nd Street. But once sweet Wallace tries to suggest that the terrible lives endured by 90 percent of the world might have something to do with the endless demands of the most privileged 10 percent, the sliver of the world that includes the greater part of his following, and does that alone on a bare stage, with nowhere for his ideas to hide and nowhere for an audience member to get distracted, well, for many reviewers, that was just bad manners.
Shawn was overdue for expressing such bad manners. He wrote The Fever between 1985 and 1990, right after completing an earlier play, Aunt Dan and Lemon, that sought to put on stage some of the ugly self-justifications behind American involvement in Southeast Asia. Says Shawn, "Aunt Dan and Lemon certainly raised the issue of the brutal character of U.S. foreign policy, among other subjects. I had occasion to watch my own play performed quite a bit, and I realized while I was watching it over and over that my knowledge of contemporary history was very spotty. I felt I had avoided reading, for example, about Latin America. For my whole life, I had considered Latin America to be, for some reason, a subject that didn't interest me."
Like most Americans who identify themselves with the traditional, moderate left, Shawn wasn't politically adventurous. "I had always thought of myself as a rather conventional American liberal, someone who was reasonably content to vote for whoever was running for the Democrats in the presidential election." Yet watching Aunt Dan and Lemon over and over cracked that complacency. "Somehow, watching my own play made me feel my reading was almost perversely selective. So I started reading a bit about United States policy. I remember that a guy who saw my play sent me a sort-of left-wing textbook that he'd written. I think he thought perhaps the guy who'd written that play would appreciate it. He probably imagined that I was already very familiar with the point of view his book expressed, and that I shared that point of view. But in fact I wasn't there yet. There was even an actress who appeared in the play who used to read The Nation and was always talking about the great articles that appeared in it."
All this added up to changes in the author. "Psychological changes in me allowed me, somehow, to open my mind to the existence of class as a factor in human life. Aunt Dan and Lemon, I learned, was actually somewhat more left-wing than I was myself, at least consciously."
That discovery sent Shawn to the bookshelves. "I was doing a lot of reading, and eventually I was led to some explicitly left-wing reading. Until this time in my life, when I was over 40, I thought that only certain publishers published reliable books. If the book said Harvard University Press or Knopf or Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, then the contents were reliable. If it was published by a press with a less established name, then it was unreliable and possibly dangerous. What was said in the book might not be true. It might be harmful to read. So, these psychological changes in me allowed me to read books published by different publishers."
And that opened up Shawn enough to let him see himself outside of his familiar, comfortable trappings. "I was at a party and a guy at the party said he'd just come back from Nicaragua, where, at that time, the Sandinistas were fighting the Contras. Now this guy was no more of an adventurous type than I was. I'd always thought, if people are shooting somewhere, well, one mustn't go there. But I thought about this abstractly, much in the same way I thought that if it was raining it was better not to go out. One tried to stay out of anyplace frightening. But this guy at the party seemed no more of a heroic warrior type than me, just another tweed-jacketed writer at a party. I thought, "Anywhere that that guy can go, I can go."
So, to return for a moment to one of Shawn's best-known film roles, it was as if he realized he could take on the Andre role, he could be the adventurer. "And then I started doing a little traveling with Deborah Eisenberg. She was somewhat less nervous about the idea of getting shot. We spoke to a lot of people in Latin America who saw the world from what you'd call a left-wing perspective."
Those talks changed everything for Shawn, yet they also brought him closer to some in his audience. "I started writing plays in 1967. The people who seemed to appreciate them most were often English people who identified themselves as left-wing. But when they discussed their political ideas, I didn't understand them. I didn't know what they meant when they talked about class, even though I'd studied economics."
But he did so in a self-created vacuum. "I came out of a very specific corner of the American elite that absolutely refused to acknowledge the existence of class as a factor in life and really did not look at the economic interests that underlie so much of what happens. The culture that I was a part of was not able to ask itself the question, `Why do I have the privileges that I have?' As far as my parents were concerned, if the subject came up they would say, "We're perfectly comfortable. We're not rich. We're not people with wealth." Money was never discussed in my family. My father lived and died without ever knowing what it cost to buy an apple in a supermarket because I don't believe he was ever in a supermarket. When he was a child, his mother bought the apples. When he was older, my mother bought the apples. I seem to remember that my brother and I once gave him an impromptu quiz on the price of fruit, and he failed miserably. The economic factor was not discussed. If you don't discuss class, I suppose, you can't discuss the ways in which groups perpetuate their class privileges."
But Shawn kept hearing about the subject of class, and he was, at last, listening. "A lot of what I'd heard for years from my English friends began coming together for me and I started coming up with thoughts of my own. Then I discovered the work of Noam Chomsky. I thought: `Wow, all this stuff I thought I'd figured out, he figured out years and years ago.' If I had found Chomsky too early, I wouldn't have written The Fever. I just would have told people to read Chomsky's work. I discovered it after I had written most of The Fever."
Getting there had been a long road. "I was piecing all this together, which is the only way The Fever could have been written, only by someone who was politically ignorant and then learned a few things. I know that so many people have come to similar understandings. I'm now well-versed in a certain way of looking at the world. It took about five years to write The Fever, but in the last two years I didn't really add anything, I just made it better written and ordered it in a logical way. Reading Chomsky validated my developing views. At the same time I was trying to get out of theater. The organizing principal of The Fever was that it wouldn't be theater, it was just a guy - or it could have been a woman - going to someone's house and presenting a monologue that was in the form of a play but that in many ways had more in common with a sermon. I always pictured that the first person to do this would be me. I wanted others to do it. I worked hard to write it in such a way that it could be done by a woman as well as by a man. In other words, The Fever was theater, and it also wasn't. The story I'm telling is made up, and there's a made-up character, so it's a work of fiction. It follows the rules of a play. But I, the author, actually mean the things the character says. It's not about a character exhibiting some bizarre form of behavior."
Even if some of the disclosures in The Fever seem self-evident, the vividness with which they're expressed and the intensity with which they're performed scream with life. Shawn speaks of seeing an aging beggar, "sick, very sick, near death," and considers what to do about it. "Yes," he knows, switching to the damning second person that every great artist from Bob Dylan all the way back to Homer knows can offer the speaker great power, "Yes, there's money in your purse. You'll give her some of it." Only some of it? "Why not all of it?" That, Shawn's narrator declaims, "is the question that could poison your life." Well, yes, of course, and one can't help but nod when Shawn passes on that "Without the poor to do awful work, we would spend our lives doing awful work," but rarely has that feeling been conveyed with such clarity and a sense of discovery.
But what to do about that discovery? The Fever is, in a way, an outstanding play about how little words can do. Shawn insists that we have to recognize that "sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor" and that "believing fervently in gradual change does not change the life of the poor," but where does his narrator take that knowledge? We don't know, although the closing section, here titled "The Life I Live," isn't particularly optimistic. Shawn's character does not take any action in the course of the night described in the play. He ends the play in his fetid hotel room, pondering the life of a "traitor," taking the side of the oppressed against his privileged peers, but I believe he will reject such a calling. He is not going to do it. He is going to go "home," whatever that now means.
Shawn continues to offer up stunning, diverse work, whether it be writing the brutal The Designated Mourner or providing the voice of everyone's favorite neurotic plastic dinosaur in the Toy Story films. But, regardless of its superficial reception, The Fever remains a turning point: "That represented a permanent change in me, apparently. There were a few years in which I experienced overwhelming self-hate or an ability to hate myself or to see myself as someone who truly hated me would see me. That was a kind of gift that came - and went. These days I don't get up every morning and go around feeling that way. But the way of looking at the world which came to me at that time is still my way of looking at the world."
And now, on these CDs, we can hear that revelation.
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