There are worse ways to take in a play than through scratchy speakers in an old car while driving by yourself from Portland to Seattle on a sunny afternoon, past hills and dales and mini-malls and truck stops and the Uncle Sam billboard near Centralia with the block-letter messages both conservative ("democrat motto: vote early, vote often") and cryptic ("what's the difference between a constitutional republic and a democracy?"). It is best if the theater is a monologue—like The Fever, by Wallace Shawn, released on CD two months ago. You can control the conditions of your attention, stopping Mr. Shawn mid-sentence, making him repeat himself. It's convenient.
The play begins at night, in a bathroom in a hotel in a poor country. The narrator is deathly ill, vomiting, hallucinating, and telling us why he came, on a pilgrimage of penance, to massage his conscience. "My parents raised me to think about people, the world, humanity beauty... My father, in an armchair, reading about China. My mother with the newspaper on a long sofa. Orange juice on a table in a glass pitcher." He grew up a sensitive liberal aesthete among liberal aesthetes. "I like to go out at night in a cosmopolitan city and sit in a dark auditorium watching dancers fly into each other's arms... Shouldn't we decorate our lives and our world as if we were having a permanent party? Shouldn't there be bells made of paper hanging from the ceiling and paper balls?" But he was convinced to visit the unnamed country by increments: the Marxist diatribe of a young man on a nude beach; a young woman waiting for a bus with the name of the country printed on her T-shirt; reading Das Kapital on a whim and running into an "upsetting, sort of ugly phrase... 'commodity fetishism.'"
When Shawn began performing The Fever in 1991, some critics dismissed it as a cheap polemic on liberal guilt. They're wrong. (When Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon premiered in 1985, the main character articulated her pro-Nazi position so convincingly, critics accused Shawn of fascist tendencies.) The Fever's narrator is liberal guilt, with a cherry on top—fat and oblivious one moment, guilt-racked and obsessed with Latin American torture chambers the next—but the play isn't didactic. It asks questions it cannot answer.
The narrator rhapsodizes about his pleasant, gentle life in tender passages about dinners with friends or the opening of a present (the snap of the tape, the sigh of the wrapping paper). He sympathizes with the poor and whispers words of hope into his pillow at night: "Soon you will have all the medicine for your children, soon, a home." He gives some money to a beautiful beggar—but not all his money. "I worked for that money. I worked hard. I worked. I worked... I can spend it any way I like. This is the basis of our entire lives." He is right. Convenience matters. I finished the story and drove on, past the mini-malls and Mexican chain restaurants, and listened to it again.
