This provocative, trenchant, one-person play by Wallace Shawn (who conceived it to be performed in homes and apartments, for groups of ten or twelve -- and who performed it himself in New York for many months), is set in a cheap hotel room in an unnamed country where the hero (Paul Mackley), a functionary for a human-rights organization, lies suffering from a malaria-like illness which gives him the fever of the title and triggers a stream-of disjointed-consciousness monologue. Recollections of the hero's comfortable middle-class life (food, wine, theater, shopping) mix with images of the prison life and torture he has been investigating. Also at work in the man is his exceedingly acute awareness of the split between rich and poor today, with the former enjoying a luxuriant, favored lifestyle at the expense of people living in shacks and working for multinationals like Nike for fifteen cents an hour.
Shawn takes an unabashedly Marxist stance toward this battle of the classes, but he never lets his writing become sloganistic or agit-prop. On the contrary, he sees to it that every insight, every thought, comes out of character and has the pungent ring of hard-felt truth. The political content of The Fever will challenge everyone in the audience to reexamine his or her right to live a privileged life while more than half the world suffers from malnutrition, exploitation and fascism.
Mackley, performing in a corner of a Japan Town coffeehouse, shows steely control as an actor and delivers Shawn's monologue with remarkable poetry, power and precision. He also takes the show to prisons, homes and social-work conferences, bringing a kind of personal, compelling, socially aware theater that has not been seen in the USA since the revolutionary days of the 60s.
