‘The Fever’
It’s pretty easy to tap into liberal guilt these days, what with wars of dubious validity, natural disasters upending the lives of thousands and the highest unemployment numbers in decades.
In 1991, actor/playwright Wallace Shawn first performed The Fever, a meditation on the awareness of injustice, to mostly negative reviews. But by this decade it had become Shawn’s most-performed work.
You only have three more days to see it at the Compass Theatre, wonderfully performed by Minnesota actor Bryan Bevell (former artistic director of the late, lamented Fritz Blitz festival), who last performed the play here a decade ago.
It’s a simple premise: a man from an unnamed (but clearly American) rich country travels to a foreign country “where my language is not spoken,” and where he sees and hears about revolution, torture and murder. He gets literally sick, and in between vomiting bouts, has a sort of fever dream in which the rightness of his comfortable existence is called into question.
He recalls that someone left a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital on his doorstep, which made him aware of the human costs of producing coffee and other products he has taken for granted for so many years.
He recalls attending a New York performance of The Cherry Orchard (whose heroine loses her family’s homestead and is forced to move to an apartment in Paris) and wondering why he is expected to feel sad about that.
But his conscience is really pricked when he sees an old beggar on the street in the nameless poor country, and the central question arises: “Yes, you think, there’s money in your purse,” he says. “You’ll give her some of it.
And a voice says, ‘Why not all of it? Why not give her all that you have?’”
He doesn’t have an answer for that, but it frightens him into a back-and-forth with himself, first attempting to justify his wealth (“I’ve worked for it!”) and then to justify poverty (“What they have is what they deserve”), knowing in his gut this is not true.
It is largely true that our wealth comes at the expense of the poor. What should we do about that?
There are no new concepts here: Shawn’s piece is not really so different from the discussions college students have in dorm rooms, except that his character – a man who has made it in a rich country – stands to lose a great deal more if he acts on those thoughts. And the script could stand a bit of trimming – even at 90 minutes, the last 10 do seem a bit redundant.
But much of the writing is lyrical, Bevell’s performance riveting, the topic important.
The Fever plays through February 10 at Compass Theatre. Shows today at 4 and 7 p.m.; Monday through Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. For tickets call (619) 328-5862 or visit www.compasstheatre.com.
Bryan Bevell in Wallace Shawn's 'The Fever' at Compass Theatre
