If family epics were ever to come back into fashion, the tale of three generations of male Shawns could rival The Forsyth Saga. It would tell the story of America from the thrusting energy of the self-made man in the first generation, to complete absorption into the East Coast establishment in the next and finally to the rage, disgust and disillusionment of the third.
The grandfather, Benjamin Chon, known as Jackknife Ben, was the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who set up as a street peddler, sold knives and later jewellery in the Chicago stockyards and made a small fortune. His children grew up in a house with servants and a billiard room, and were triumphantly assimilated into the American upper class.
His son William, his surname safely Anglicised, became, as the revered, long-serving and famously fastidious editor of The New Yorker, one of the presiding figures of the post-war liberal intellectual establishment. And then along comes his son Wallace, haunted by the conviction that to be born into American abundance is to have a soul marked with original sin and driven to become the most insidiously seditious and subtly subversive figure in contemporary American theatre .
Guilt, not gratitude, is the keynote of Wallace Shawn's reflections on the luxury of his childhood. In his opening monologue in Louis Malle's film My Dinner With Andre, in which he plays himself in a long conversation with the director Andre Gregory, Shawn recalls his privileged childhood in Manhattan, where he was born in 1943: "I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was 10 years old, I was rich. I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music."
In another sense, Shawn is still part of an American elite, the aristocracy of celebrity. He is a familiar if quirky presence in American popular culture, an actor whose distinctive looks, wry demeanour and lisping, querulous voice fade in and out of prime time television shows and mainstream movies.
He has been a recurring character in sitcoms such as Taxi and The Cosby Show. He played Candice Bergen's unbearable ex-colleague in Murphy Brown and Mr Hall, the lovelorn high school teacher, in both the movie Clueless and the television series it spawned. He was Zek the Grand Magus in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He was the Masked Avenger in Woody Allen's Radio Days and the voice of Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story.
Yet there is also another Wallace Shawn, a playwright who is still a rather obscure presence in American theatre. This Shawn is a dark figure glowering on the margins of American consumer culture, muttering about blood and sex and torture. The two aspects of his public persona seem absurdly incompatible, almost as if Samuel Beckett had made regular guest appearances in The Brady Bunch and The Lone Ranger.
Sitting on a warm September afternoon, on the pavement outside a cafe in Greenwich Village, sipping an iced mochachino, he might still seem, to the casual observer, a gentleman of privileged leisure. And indeed, he says, it was not until he was well into his forties that he fully detached himself from the world view of his parents.
"They believed", he recalls, "in the basic and fundamental decency of the American system. They felt that the welfare state and civil rights were causes that fit right in with the essence of our very nice country. They were horrified by the Vietnam war and by dogs attacking black people in the South. They thought there were just well-meaning people and there were malevolent people who you had to guard against. They didn't really approach politics systematically at all - they didn't really think you could."
Shawn's own early plays were produced by radical theatre groups on both sides of the Atlantic: Joint Stock in London, La Mama and the Public Theatre in New York.With their explicit sexual content and depictions of intimate brutality, they are demonstrations of the vileness of supposedly polite society.
One, A Thought in Three Parts, evoked the kind of political response that can mislead an artist into thinking that shocking an audience is, in itself, a radical political act. There were visits from the police, complaints in the House of Lords (Lord Nugent of Guildford called on the government to "protect the public against this sort of pollution"), and intimations that the charitable status of the theatre where it was staged might be removed. Yet Shawn was not really setting out to outrage his audiences.
"I had a very bad experience for the most part with the audience in New York in the 1970s and the early 1980s, really bad. I felt that the great majority of the people who were in the audience had paid to see a certain number of plays and they didn't know what those plays would be. When they found out, 80 or 90 per cent would feel angry and disappointed and very, very sorry that they were at the play.
"That is to me pointless and pitiful and I didn't learn anything from that. It was so awful that if I had expected that those people would ever again see one of my plays, I wouldn't have been able to write at all. I had to almost forget the reality in order to write."
It was not until he wrote Aunt Dan and Lemon, the play which first brought him to the attention of mainstream audiences in Europe, that he began to really deal with something much more shocking than sexual politics.
"I started thinking about Germany in the 1930s. I did what was for me a lot of reading about that period, at the same time thinking and reading about Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was a teenage idol of mine. I very much loved his early writings when he was working for President Kennedy and before. I think I probably was familiar with his work before Nixon was. I thought he'd figured everything out, how to keep the world safe from nuclear war and at the same time still prevent those Communists from taking over."
The play slowly and insidiously, and in a tone of calm reasonableness, asks the audience to accept that Kissinger's policies in Vietnam had the same moral basis as Hitler's in Germany. The main character puts it to us that "we're enjoying a certain way of life - and we're actually living - due to the existence of certain other people who are willing to take the job of killing on their own backs". As she draws the audience into her logic, it becomes complicit in her view of the world. Only when he joined that audience did Shawn fully realise what he was saying.
"In writing Aunt Dan and Lemon, he says, "I hadn't really figured out any political conclusions for myself. I hadn't yet really formulated a position. But watching my own play again and again I remember literally sitting in the audience and getting the point that ruthlessness and murderousness have a lot in common whatever explanation lies behind it."
"The US in Vietnam was theoretically motivated by certain altruistic ideals. And Hitler's ideals written down on paper are less attractive. But the way that brutality felt from the victim's side was the same. To the individual victim, if someone is torturing them, it feels like they're being tortured."
Shawn had found his subject: the collusion of nice, well-meaning liberal people in terrible crimes. And it is one he has developed even more systematically in his two major subsequent plays The Fever and The Designated Mourner. He had also found a tone, an intimate, friendly, reasonable voice that is in fact much more disturbing than the explicit assaults of his early work. "The Fever", he says, "is almost in the form of a conspiratorial meeting of the bourgeoisie. One privileged person is sharing frank thoughts with others of his kind."
The intimacy is often literal. He initially performed The Fever, an explicitly left-wing political monologue, for small gatherings in Manhattan apartments. The Designated Mourner was recently staged with great success for audiences of 30 people a night in an apartment building in New York. But these strategies come partly from the impatience of audiences even in the liberal off-Broadway subscription companies with Shawn's moral seriousness.
"There's a very conscious statement made that this is basically being written for an audience of thoughtful, well-meaning, privileged people. But frequently they weren't that thoughtful. They were out for a superficial entertainment and found my plays boring. These plays are rather cerebral. If you want a kind of fast-paced entertainment, then there's really no point in going to them. People would say `wasn't it exciting that people were walking out or booing?', and I'd say `not really'. They were walking out because they were bored or didn't understand it. They weren't booing because I was criticising capitalism and they believed in it so strongly." Though he is now a hugely respected figure in Europe, and though The Designated Mourner was well-received in New York, he remains, as a writer, a curiously marginal figure in America. "I don't really fit well into the American theatre, though I'm not going to complain about it. I'm not allowed to because I really have had some luck.
"Even though my plays are virtually never done by any of the regional theatres and even though I'm not on the lists when people are writing about American theatre today, all the same there are enough people out there who seem to be aware of what I've written - that I've crossed over a line. That means I won't have the right to complain for many years to come. Maybe if things get really bad, by 2005 I'll start complaining again."
Two plays by Wallace Shawn, Marie and Bruce and The Appendix to Aunt Dan and Lemon will be performed by the Gare St. Lazare theatre company in Andrew's Lane Studio from October 10th to 19th at 8.15 p.m. as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. The company will then tour Cork city, Kilmallock, Listowel, Castletownsend, Kilkenny and Kilworth.
