As I said "The Fever" is a 1991 play (theater monologue), written by Wallace Shawn. This was 10 years after the My Dinner with Andre movie was produced, in 1981. The character is in some way fascinated by "the-poor", and he finds himself traveling in more and more countries of the-poor. ["The-Poor" is my editing convention, not always used in the piece. I use it as sort of a "marker" for racism.] It fits.
So in one of these countries this character comes down with a violent fever, and is immobilized on the bathroom floor of his hotel, vomiting and having these hallucinations. He has no power, not even to stand up. The play traces through these delusions, in about 15,000 words. I cut it down to 5,000 words, and I took out most of the caustic images that were deemed necessary by Shawn in 1991. (About torture and such). I don't think that they are necessary in today's age, when killing and war are commonplace in the news and in life.
This play is on Youtube in at least two places. One is just reading, where you don't see the performer, and one is actually recited in a living room by Jim Luken. If you have time and want to see this performance, it is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-bWuxrKLKw
Like with all theater, (for me) it is difficult to pick up all of the dialog. I suggest that you open the script of the play, and read along with him. He remembers most of it pretty well. Here is the script:
This play is called THE FEVER, by Wallace Shawn, written in 1991. I’ll tell more about it in another comment. Wallace Shawn has written many works and acted in 100 movies or plays. He is most well known for co-writing and acting in the “cult film” My Dinner with Andre, 1981. It is a cult film because it was a breakthrough, and it still has a following, 45 years later.
Here are some things Shawn says about the process with My Dinner with Andre. Quote:
Let's say that it was 1969 or 1970 and I was about 27 I had very strong feelings about theater and I also had the feeling that I would be very influenced by anything that I saw and I was afraid of seeing productions, because I thought they would harm me or something, that I would be vulnerable and perhaps just deflected from the true path that I was following, by seeing certain things that might be too strong for me. I was afraid of everything anyway.
I mean in life, about practically everything. Fear has played a big part in my life and of course, in My Dinner with Andre it's all about Fear. So, Ranata Adler called me and she said this play “Alice in Wonderland” is incredible you have to see it, the actors fly through space and they do unbelievable things, and I said I don't want to see that. That will be, - it's just not the type of theater I can accept I'm against it and I don't want to see it.
And Ranata knew me very well and she had read the plays that I'd written and there were only a couple of people who liked my plays, and she was one of them. She said no, but you really should see this because it's really so amazing and she mentioned it, you know many times, so finally I said well, all right.
I guess I have to go to it and so I went to it and it really was, it was so astounding.
This is the amazing thing about theater and you know, you cannot describe it, really and you can't even see it, even though there are videos of it and the photographs of it, you just can’t know it.
I mean in the cliché, poetry is what is left out of the translation, and Theater is what's left out of the photographs and even the video.
You can't describe it, but people involuntarily screamed during the play in the way that people do on a roller coaster, it was so terrifying and thrilling and you thought the actors would be killed, it was like the circus and it was also the funniest thing you've ever seen in your life, and it was the most polished piece of theater that I had ever seen.
And then I went to see it a third time when they were doing it in Connecticut, and at that time I brought Andre (Gregory), an envelope of my plays which I did to everybody. I mean I carried envelopes of my plays; how many were there at that time, well I'd probably written about five plays.
I believed in myself as a playwright at that time, more than I really was. I really believed in myself and I presented these plays to everybody and no one in the professional theater liked them, no one, and no one outside of the theater liked them, except for a couple of people but then Andre.
I gave him the plays but I didn't expect to ever hear from him, any more than I had heard from other people. And he called me several months later, I was staying in Cedar Falls Iowa by myself writing a play, and he called and said, I love your plays and you know, I want you to come work with my company.
I would say we got to know each other later, really in making the film MDwA. What gave me the idea for the movie was he had told me some of his experiences and I had listened to him. Obviously, I was skeptical of some of his beliefs, but in daily life I wouldn't have expressed that. Even in the movie, my character, I say something like “do you really want to know? I'm really going to tell you what I think” like I sort of wind up, it's like you prepare him for it. It's in some ways, I guess acknowledging that it's not what people generally do. Yeah, but it did seem like a very very funny idea to me to just have the one guy who so passionately trying to make something of his life and the other guy who was thinking only of surviving.
I suppose when we began, what seemed funny was that my character was skeptical, as we continued the process, I was getting more and more into it and taking it more and more seriously, and seeing that it was not skepticism so much as that character was very defended.
He was defending himself; he was terrified by the things that his friend was saying and then the film came to have a different meaning for me, but the original idea was that it was funny, and that somehow then there would be a third element which would be the real world going on while the two different types of bourgeoisies or whatever, were chatting.
I mean that maybe we would be walking and we would be passing people who were digging a ditch and working or I don't know, one of the many really interesting things about the movie for me is sort of the notion of what's conscious and what's unconscious.
I mean first and foremost what is not conscious what is not conscious and what is not said is that we're two upper class guys spending hours talking about life, while others are working, maybe suffering, and so the most unconscious thing is our political environment, right?
I actually had a purpose as I was writing this movie, a personal goal, I had a personal purpose in this as it developed. It didn't begin that way but as we worked on it, the filming of it, and particularly during the writing process, I wanted to destroy that guy that I played, to the extent that there was any of the real me in there. That was the side of me that I wanted to get rid of.
I wanted to kill that side of myself by making the film, really, because that guy is totally motivated by fear, and he's defending himself and he's a very; - well, he's, he is the bourgeoisie human being.
With some things I feel just like Wallace Shawn describes. I don't want to see any movies, or hear many people's opinions. But with me it is not based on fear, but to keep a consistency in my experiment. I believe that my today unfolds from my interpretation of my yesterday. I call that a unique personal path. Of course there are influences from the outside. This I don't deny, but I am not searching for the truth of "the other". I am not looking for the authority. Enough of it gets in here anyway, not to be so curious about more of it.
I am saying that in my opinion the values that other stories are based on are the main problems in personal and communal life. These are the duplicitous ideas that all contradictions and dilemmas are based on. what can you learn? Why society is a mess.
This is a pretty good representation of the history of western man, (sort of in a dream / nightmare format). It starts with the local elite, those with a militia, and when they conquer larger and larger populations, that full force is applied to their colonial empire. Those militias were initially necessary since they were continually attacking each other to take what they could get. Starting with Rome and earlier.
How will the reader accept this or even bother with it. In other words we all know ancient history, if only in shreds. And we have all DISMISSED IT as "that used to be the (killing) nature of mankind". But now; as expressed beautifully in the piece, we believe that this is civilization. We can stop all the killing and just offer gradual homogenization, human rights. (How gradual?) Really it is expressed very well in the piece.
"I am not going to open my eyes to anything else."
I think this was written 30 or more years ago. Little did he know that today (and every day), 150 more innocent people are killed in Gaza, and many tortured. Little did he know that today, and every day 1,500 human beings are blown apart in the Ukraine. Of course, they are not human beings. Once you put a uniform on, you are a soldier. Soldiers are meant to be killed.
And all of this, so that when I reach for my coffee on the kitchen shelf, IT IS SURELY THERE, as I expect it will be. We will be secure, once our NATO base is installed on the Russian border, and once we have the Crimea Naval Base, so that Russia is forced out of the Black Sea.
Then we will go to concerts, discuss movies, buy artwork, eat in fine restaurants, drink fine wine, take little trips, and have solace and consolation every day of the year. It is a goal worth killing a few rebels for.
No reader is going to digest this! (Or let's hear from them.)
Something begs to be said here, but how would we know what expression will suffice? This is a theater piece, a one person drama with a very strong interior message. This play is several decades old, but I believe it is very timely today. Even 10 years ago it would have had much LESS impact. Now it will be dismissed on various grounds, but some parts of the core speak the obvious.
If you tried to transmit this message directly, it would surely fall flat. But the theater device has a way of penetrating. So the idea gets in, and the repercussions and connections are felt. The main reaction is probably; "so, what can I do about it"? Well, there is no real "peace movement" that I can see, so I can't join it. Or it's difficult to start your own drive for world conciliation. (Librarian did).
Is it left off there then?
Let's say that righting wrongs is a gradual process. (It is said so in the play). But where is the progress? China claims it has solved domestic poverty last year. I don't know how that is calculated. It seems the west is getting more divisive, which means western poverty must be growing. Or what is poverty? Someone actually mentioned to me, yesterday in a random conversation, that the poverty level in San Francisco, for a working couple is $140,000 per year. (How disconnected am I?)
We are told that all our prosperity comes from our Democracy, our freedoms and universal human rights. So is it the "free market" that is a positive for everyone who accepts the World Trade organization. I believe it. But on closer look at today's news, Mexico is finally winning a four year court battle against Monsanto, to curb the dumping of GMO Corn in Mexico. GMO Corn is heavily subsidized by the US government, so that Mexican corn prices have dropped 66%. Mexico does NOT subsidize agriculture.
But the real reason for GMO is it is immune to the "Roundup" weed-killer, the glyphosate poison that is forced into the human food chain. Keep in mind that Mexicans eat 1,000% (ten times), the quantity of corn that Americans eat. So they are eating 1,000% of the glyphosate. Is your prosperity connected with the Mexican consumption of glyphosate? Well, yes it is. It is Freedom and Democracy in action.
Why is there all this hostility in the world? What does it have to do with me? If I don't inform myself about it, am I even further detached? Those bad people are doing all those bad things. Which bad people? I don't know who, they must all be bad.
Here's a link about the Mexican corn war, but I don't want to transform this comment into forced world trade.
As I said "The Fever" is a 1991 play (theater monologue), written by Wallace Shawn. This was 10 years after the My Dinner with Andre movie was produced, in 1981. The character is in some way fascinated by "the-poor", and he finds himself traveling in more and more countries of the-poor. ["The-Poor" is my editing convention, not always used in the piece. I use it as sort of a "marker" for racism.] It fits.
So in one of these countries this character comes down with a violent fever, and is immobilized on the bathroom floor of his hotel, vomiting and having these hallucinations. He has no power, not even to stand up. The play traces through these delusions, in about 15,000 words. I cut it down to 5,000 words, and I took out most of the caustic images that were deemed necessary by Shawn in 1991. (About torture and such). I don't think that they are necessary in today's age, when killing and war are commonplace in the news and in life.
This play is on Youtube in at least two places. One is just reading, where you don't see the performer, and one is actually recited in a living room by Jim Luken. If you have time and want to see this performance, it is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-bWuxrKLKw
Like with all theater, (for me) it is difficult to pick up all of the dialog. I suggest that you open the script of the play, and read along with him. He remembers most of it pretty well. Here is the script:
https://brax.me/f/The%20Fever%20--%20Wallace%20Shawn%20--%201991%20--%20The%20Noonday%20Press.pdf/T4AZ668616ea4c6c31.84227751
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This play is called THE FEVER, by Wallace Shawn, written in 1991. I’ll tell more about it in another comment. Wallace Shawn has written many works and acted in 100 movies or plays. He is most well known for co-writing and acting in the “cult film” My Dinner with Andre, 1981. It is a cult film because it was a breakthrough, and it still has a following, 45 years later.
Here are some things Shawn says about the process with My Dinner with Andre. Quote:
Let's say that it was 1969 or 1970 and I was about 27 I had very strong feelings about theater and I also had the feeling that I would be very influenced by anything that I saw and I was afraid of seeing productions, because I thought they would harm me or something, that I would be vulnerable and perhaps just deflected from the true path that I was following, by seeing certain things that might be too strong for me. I was afraid of everything anyway.
I mean in life, about practically everything. Fear has played a big part in my life and of course, in My Dinner with Andre it's all about Fear. So, Ranata Adler called me and she said this play “Alice in Wonderland” is incredible you have to see it, the actors fly through space and they do unbelievable things, and I said I don't want to see that. That will be, - it's just not the type of theater I can accept I'm against it and I don't want to see it.
And Ranata knew me very well and she had read the plays that I'd written and there were only a couple of people who liked my plays, and she was one of them. She said no, but you really should see this because it's really so amazing and she mentioned it, you know many times, so finally I said well, all right.
I guess I have to go to it and so I went to it and it really was, it was so astounding.
This is the amazing thing about theater and you know, you cannot describe it, really and you can't even see it, even though there are videos of it and the photographs of it, you just can’t know it.
I mean in the cliché, poetry is what is left out of the translation, and Theater is what's left out of the photographs and even the video.
You can't describe it, but people involuntarily screamed during the play in the way that people do on a roller coaster, it was so terrifying and thrilling and you thought the actors would be killed, it was like the circus and it was also the funniest thing you've ever seen in your life, and it was the most polished piece of theater that I had ever seen.
And then I went to see it a third time when they were doing it in Connecticut, and at that time I brought Andre (Gregory), an envelope of my plays which I did to everybody. I mean I carried envelopes of my plays; how many were there at that time, well I'd probably written about five plays.
I believed in myself as a playwright at that time, more than I really was. I really believed in myself and I presented these plays to everybody and no one in the professional theater liked them, no one, and no one outside of the theater liked them, except for a couple of people but then Andre.
I gave him the plays but I didn't expect to ever hear from him, any more than I had heard from other people. And he called me several months later, I was staying in Cedar Falls Iowa by myself writing a play, and he called and said, I love your plays and you know, I want you to come work with my company.
I would say we got to know each other later, really in making the film MDwA. What gave me the idea for the movie was he had told me some of his experiences and I had listened to him. Obviously, I was skeptical of some of his beliefs, but in daily life I wouldn't have expressed that. Even in the movie, my character, I say something like “do you really want to know? I'm really going to tell you what I think” like I sort of wind up, it's like you prepare him for it. It's in some ways, I guess acknowledging that it's not what people generally do. Yeah, but it did seem like a very very funny idea to me to just have the one guy who so passionately trying to make something of his life and the other guy who was thinking only of surviving.
I suppose when we began, what seemed funny was that my character was skeptical, as we continued the process, I was getting more and more into it and taking it more and more seriously, and seeing that it was not skepticism so much as that character was very defended.
He was defending himself; he was terrified by the things that his friend was saying and then the film came to have a different meaning for me, but the original idea was that it was funny, and that somehow then there would be a third element which would be the real world going on while the two different types of bourgeoisies or whatever, were chatting.
I mean that maybe we would be walking and we would be passing people who were digging a ditch and working or I don't know, one of the many really interesting things about the movie for me is sort of the notion of what's conscious and what's unconscious.
I mean first and foremost what is not conscious what is not conscious and what is not said is that we're two upper class guys spending hours talking about life, while others are working, maybe suffering, and so the most unconscious thing is our political environment, right?
I actually had a purpose as I was writing this movie, a personal goal, I had a personal purpose in this as it developed. It didn't begin that way but as we worked on it, the filming of it, and particularly during the writing process, I wanted to destroy that guy that I played, to the extent that there was any of the real me in there. That was the side of me that I wanted to get rid of.
I wanted to kill that side of myself by making the film, really, because that guy is totally motivated by fear, and he's defending himself and he's a very; - well, he's, he is the bourgeoisie human being.
.
With some things I feel just like Wallace Shawn describes. I don't want to see any movies, or hear many people's opinions. But with me it is not based on fear, but to keep a consistency in my experiment. I believe that my today unfolds from my interpretation of my yesterday. I call that a unique personal path. Of course there are influences from the outside. This I don't deny, but I am not searching for the truth of "the other". I am not looking for the authority. Enough of it gets in here anyway, not to be so curious about more of it.
I am saying that in my opinion the values that other stories are based on are the main problems in personal and communal life. These are the duplicitous ideas that all contradictions and dilemmas are based on. what can you learn? Why society is a mess.
I already know that.
.
If you have any stories of "wisdom", let's look at them. If there is truly wisdom, I will certainly acknowledge it.
.
This is a pretty good representation of the history of western man, (sort of in a dream / nightmare format). It starts with the local elite, those with a militia, and when they conquer larger and larger populations, that full force is applied to their colonial empire. Those militias were initially necessary since they were continually attacking each other to take what they could get. Starting with Rome and earlier.
How will the reader accept this or even bother with it. In other words we all know ancient history, if only in shreds. And we have all DISMISSED IT as "that used to be the (killing) nature of mankind". But now; as expressed beautifully in the piece, we believe that this is civilization. We can stop all the killing and just offer gradual homogenization, human rights. (How gradual?) Really it is expressed very well in the piece.
"I am not going to open my eyes to anything else."
I think this was written 30 or more years ago. Little did he know that today (and every day), 150 more innocent people are killed in Gaza, and many tortured. Little did he know that today, and every day 1,500 human beings are blown apart in the Ukraine. Of course, they are not human beings. Once you put a uniform on, you are a soldier. Soldiers are meant to be killed.
And all of this, so that when I reach for my coffee on the kitchen shelf, IT IS SURELY THERE, as I expect it will be. We will be secure, once our NATO base is installed on the Russian border, and once we have the Crimea Naval Base, so that Russia is forced out of the Black Sea.
Then we will go to concerts, discuss movies, buy artwork, eat in fine restaurants, drink fine wine, take little trips, and have solace and consolation every day of the year. It is a goal worth killing a few rebels for.
No reader is going to digest this! (Or let's hear from them.)
.
Something begs to be said here, but how would we know what expression will suffice? This is a theater piece, a one person drama with a very strong interior message. This play is several decades old, but I believe it is very timely today. Even 10 years ago it would have had much LESS impact. Now it will be dismissed on various grounds, but some parts of the core speak the obvious.
If you tried to transmit this message directly, it would surely fall flat. But the theater device has a way of penetrating. So the idea gets in, and the repercussions and connections are felt. The main reaction is probably; "so, what can I do about it"? Well, there is no real "peace movement" that I can see, so I can't join it. Or it's difficult to start your own drive for world conciliation. (Librarian did).
Is it left off there then?
Let's say that righting wrongs is a gradual process. (It is said so in the play). But where is the progress? China claims it has solved domestic poverty last year. I don't know how that is calculated. It seems the west is getting more divisive, which means western poverty must be growing. Or what is poverty? Someone actually mentioned to me, yesterday in a random conversation, that the poverty level in San Francisco, for a working couple is $140,000 per year. (How disconnected am I?)
We are told that all our prosperity comes from our Democracy, our freedoms and universal human rights. So is it the "free market" that is a positive for everyone who accepts the World Trade organization. I believe it. But on closer look at today's news, Mexico is finally winning a four year court battle against Monsanto, to curb the dumping of GMO Corn in Mexico. GMO Corn is heavily subsidized by the US government, so that Mexican corn prices have dropped 66%. Mexico does NOT subsidize agriculture.
But the real reason for GMO is it is immune to the "Roundup" weed-killer, the glyphosate poison that is forced into the human food chain. Keep in mind that Mexicans eat 1,000% (ten times), the quantity of corn that Americans eat. So they are eating 1,000% of the glyphosate. Is your prosperity connected with the Mexican consumption of glyphosate? Well, yes it is. It is Freedom and Democracy in action.
Why is there all this hostility in the world? What does it have to do with me? If I don't inform myself about it, am I even further detached? Those bad people are doing all those bad things. Which bad people? I don't know who, they must all be bad.
Here's a link about the Mexican corn war, but I don't want to transform this comment into forced world trade.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07/mexico-scores-major-victory-against-bayer-owned-monsanto-as-corn-war-with-us-reaches-decisive-moment.html
.