The Designated Mourner

National Review, June 16, 1997 by John Simon

THE etiology of unearned success is neither simple nor uninteresting, and it deserves greater attention than it gets. Consider, for example, The Designated Mourner and its author, Wallace Shawn. A small, chubby fellow with an assertive fringe of hair and an understatedly porcine countenance, Shawn owes his status to a number of extracurricular circumstances.

First, he is the son of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, a magazine that anybody who is anybody reads, wants to be published in, or hopes for good reviews from. Rightly or wrongly, appreciation of Wallace -- or Wally, as people call him -- was perceived as a stepping-stone to that magazine. Yet those in the know also realized that, in rebellion against his father, Wally had become a bohemian and, it seems, self-supporting, which naturally enhanced his moral stature. Then, for his movie Manhattan, Woody Allen needed a sight gag: he had to find an actor unsightlier than himself. When the legendary ex-husband of the Diane Keaton character of whom the Woody character was madly jealous turned out to be Wally Shawn, laughter exploded.

There was an equally useful obverse side to this: people felt pity for the grotesque gnome and responded sympathetically whenever he appeared in bit parts, usually as a waiter or such. At the same time, Shawn started writing plays, consistently feeble and frequently obscene. Thus Marie and Bruce, in which the one joke was that the eponymous spouses hurled blue streaks of obscenity and scatology at each other. Shawn's other main theme was war on bourgeois America, possibly identifiable as attacks on his father, and climaxing in the pro-fascist Aunt Dan and Lemon. Barely a succcs d'estime in New York, this was a hit in London, where American self-hatred is always a welcome excuse for a gloat-fest.

Shawn also made a very modest splash in two bigger movie roles: in My Dinner with Andre, which he co-wrote with Andre Gregory, who co-starred; and in Vanya on 42nd Street, which Gregory in a manner co-directed with Louis Malle, the director of Andre. Both were art-house films of limited appeal, but they enhanced Shawn's standing among pseudo-intellectuals, who are conveniently more numerous and clamorous than the genuine article.

In My Dinner with Andre, the bohemian Wally accepts a posh dinner invitation from the affluent Andre, each playing himself. They talk about their life experiences seemingly spontaneously, but actually from miles of edited tape. Still, the effect is that of two thoughtful, articulate types freely opining about, and animadverting on, life and art. Presented with a passable facsimile of sophisticated conversation, less verbal viewers were suitably impressed.

Vanya on 42nd Street was Malle's filmed version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, as rehearsed off and on in various New York locations by a group of convivial actors between other engagements, and directed by Gregory. It was shot in a disused theater, with Shawn giving a dreadful performance as a Vanya so puny, puling, and piddling as to render inevitable Yelyena's lack of response to his attraction, and turn poignance into anticlimax.

Meanwhile Shawn had also contrived a dramatic monologue, The Fever (1991), which he performed in various venues, mostly people's living rooms. In it, the narrator-protagonist experiences from his hotel room a revolution in an unnamed country, and, once again, social discontent and personal grudge fuse into an anti-bourgeois screed (or screech). This one caught even some of the Pavlovianly pro-Shawn critics short on saliva.

And now we have The Designated Mourner, first performed as a play at Britain's Royal National Theatre, and marking Mike Nichols's debut as a dramatic actor. England was not undivided in its assent to this intertwining of three monologues, with only the merest smidgen of direct exchange among the trio seated at a table, but Nichols's performance was panegyrized in unison. This even after it was revealed that he was reading off a teleprompter hidden behind a pile of books. Why not, though? Nichols's background as a stand-up improvisational comic enabled him to sound chattily complicitous, and refusing to memorize Shawn's lucubrations shows, at any rate, some judgment.

David Hare's movie version is simply the photographed nonplay. There is a striking, spangled-looking wall behind the three characters seated not too close together at a long, narrow table (design by the dependable Bob Crawley), and Oliver Stapleton's cinematography fluctuates between orange quasi-firelight for the present, and ghostly slate blue for the past. I suffered through roughly half of this 95-minute talkathon; the rest, I read from the prestigiously published text by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Here we have Jack, a glib pseudo-intellectual; Judy, his more delicate wife; and Howard, her father, a revolutionary prosaist turned poet in his mature years. The helpful stage directions read in toto: "Jack is older than Judy. Howard is older than Jack." The piece concerns Jack and Judy's uneasy marriage, with the jealous Howard as a terzo incomodo. Revolution breaks out, Howard and Judy are executed, but Jack the turncoat is spared. He continues as a mass journalist, and enjoys the single life, especially sitting on a park bench.