The Fever

As a character actor, Wallace Shawn has an adorably unthreatening persona. But as a playwright, he bites savagely at the hands that have fed him all his life: the high-minded class of culturati that includes exactly the kind of person who is likely to attend a trenchant Off Broadway play about the disease of capitalism—and pay richly for the privilege. (He’s like a guest at a dinner party who distracts you with talk of literature and dance, then stabs you in the ribs with his salad fork.) On Sunday and Monday nights during the run of his latest play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, he performs his purgatory 1991 monologue The Fever, last seen in NYC in 2021, the tale of an American traveler in a war-torn country who comes to understand the hidden costs of first-world comfort.