Now Comes the Just Dessert

By Gerald Clarke

If you were to step on Wallace Shawn's foot, he would probably beg your pardon. If you were to push ahead of him in line, he might offer to hold your briefcase. He is, in short, the round little guy with the slightly comical face you have seen in such movies as Manhattan and Lovesick, and he almost apologizes for having written Off-Broadway's newest hit, Aunt Dan & Lemon. "At the risk of sounding self-pitying, the project taxed my resources to the limit and sometimes beyond," he says. "It took more brains than I had, and to figure out how to write it, I had to borrow some of next year's brains and the next year's brains as well."

In fact, if Aunt Dan had been dismissed, as were most of his previous efforts, he might have abandoned the theater altogether. "I just don't think I can write a better play than this one," he says. But how could such a pleasant person write a drama that is at once so unpleasant and annoying, yet so provocative that half of New York seems to be waiting to get into the Public Theater? The answer is that, like many moralists with a pen, Shawn has set off a verbal time bomb, mostly in a series of monologues in which his characters rationalize all sorts of evils, including Hitler's atrocities. "I'm a rather amiable person," he says, "but I believe that our society is not just a little bit sick, but very, very, very sick. That's why I write the things I do about these diseased minds. There's something dangerous about the play in that it shows brutality made intellectually respectable."

Lemon (Kathryn Pogson) is a neurotic young Englishwoman who sits in her London flat reading about the Nazis, whom she admires, and musing over her childhood, which was dominated by Aunt Dan (Linda Hunt), a slightly sinister friend of her parents. Aunt Dan, it turns out, is crazy, but crazy in the way some people are at cocktail parties; she is able to find a plausible argument for almost any evil that governments commit, and she has turned Lemon into her philosophical clone. "Lemon presents the justification for pure selfishness," says Shawn, "even for sadistic murder. The question is raised: To what extent have we already accepted these justifications? I intentionally set out to leave the audience frustrated and unsatisfied."

The son of William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker--and a man famous for his almost mandarin courtesy--young Wally was raised in a cocoon of kindness where such selfishness was unthinkable. Only when he was sent away to summer camp did he learn the awful truth about the rest of humanity. He has never recovered from the shock. "The counselors were very rough and occasionally sadistic. Once, when they were annoyed with a boy, they actually suggested that we beat him up! The whole world turned out to be like that camp. I still can't get over it, and writing, for me, is a way of trying to make sense of this world I'm surprised to find myself in."

After Harvard, Shawn taught English in India on a Fulbright scholarship, then went to Oxford, where he entered a playwriting contest. Though he did not win, he learned what he wanted to do in life. More attempts at drama followed, and despite the fact that he had never been produced, he lined up six pals who gave him $1,500 in exchange for 1% of his future earnings as a playwright. It was not until 1975 that avant-garde Producer-Director Andre Gregory (The Blacks and Endgame) put on Our Late Night, which went on to win an Obie, Off-Broadway's equivalent of the Tony Award. Theatrical fortunes are not made south of 42nd Street, however, and Shawn paid his bills by operating a Xerox machine, working as a shipping clerk and borrowing from friends. Until last month, he had made only $8,000 during his entire career as a playwright. When someone suggested that he try his luck at acting, he scoffed--politely and apologetically, of course. "But, really, it was that or driving a taxi," he says, "and acting seemed safer."

What Shawn could not see, and still cannot see, was that the combination of his short stature (5 ft. 4 1/2 in.), his pudding face under a prematurely bald head, his exaggerated earnestness and his persnickety voice immediately caused people to smile. "He's a homunculus!" said a disdainful Woody Allen in Manhattan, the first of Shawn's 21 movies, but Rumpelstiltskin might describe him just as well. His most important picture, and one of the oddest movies of the past decade, was Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre (1981). Ostensibly playing themselves, he and his patrician, bohemian friend, Andre Gregory, spend nearly two hours in a French restaurant doing nothing but eating and talking . . . and talking and talking. It sounds boring, and, by rights, it should be; but audiences seem fascinated by the inspired pairing of such polar opposites. Shawn has discovered that he likes acting. "I think that everyone should be an actor," he declares. "To always have to play the role of yourself is a great limitation."

Shawn, 42, shares a loft in Chelsea with a longtime girlfriend and fellow writer, Deborah Eisenberg; a collection of her short stories will be published by Knopf next year. Aunt Dan appears headed for a lengthy run (Grove Press has just published the script, along with an explanatory essay by Shawn), and he is hopeful that regional theaters will pick it up. But is he celebrating? Yes, no and maybe--in reverse order. "Aunt Dan has elements that are poisonous and frightening," he says, "so I feel that there's something distasteful about saying I'm having a great time because of it." Still, he admits, with proper apologies, "it's very gratifying all the same." --By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York