The Designated Mourner

The Public Theater, New York

(212) 967-7555

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Wallace Shawn’s work is never done, said Fred Kaplan in The New York Times. Though better known for wisecrack-heavy supporting roles in films like The Princess Bride, Shawn also happens to be a meticulous dramatist, one half of what may be “the most renowned playwright-director duo in New York theater.” He and avant-garde theater pioneer Andre Gregory frequently spend years writing, workshopping, rehearsing, and rewriting, sometimes with no end in sight and for tiny, or even nonexistent, audiences. That was the case with The Designated Mourner, a dystopian parable whose first American staging occurred 13 years ago in a run-down Manhattan men’s club. Shawn and Gregory have been refining it ever since, and both would tell you that it is only now coming into its own.

“But how to describe it?” said David Cote in Time Out New York. Structured as a series of monologues, the three-hour-long play is “so many things at once.” It simultaneously mourns the doomed intelligentsia of an unnamed dictatorship while skewering that elite’s political impotence and total lack of connection with the general public. Beyond that, the play becomes “a diary of one man’s psychic devolution.” Jack, played by Shawn, is a man who marries an intellectual (a “sublime” Deborah Eisenberg) and goes from struggling to share her and her father’s highbrow passions to shrugging as they meet a grim fate. Jack engenders both sympathy and revulsion, said Alexis Soloski in The Village Voice. His speeches “appeal to the philistine in most of us—that slightly shameful chunk of self that would rather spend the evening watching cat videos than reading Kierkegaard.” In that way, we all become complicit in this “masterful, exacting” tragedy.

If you say so, said Jesse Oxfeld in The New York Observer. Staged in the Public’s 99-seat Shiva Theater, this production “is unquestionably a snob event, and clearly one should enjoy it; what’s harder to discern is whether one did.” Shawn has created a world in which story specifics remain murky: “Who is doing what to whom isn’t entirely clear.” Some weighty themes were sounded, leaving me feeling a bit the way Jack did among his intellectual betters. “I am clever enough to admire The Designated Mourner, even if I don’t quite understand it.”