Aunt Dan and Lemon’ Is the Other Wallace Shawn

Funny, but playwright/actor Wallace Shawn doesn’t look like an angry man.

Not the sweet-tempered, mild-mannered Shawn of “My Dinner With Andre,” that 1981 conversation-as-film, and dozens of other movies and sitcoms? Not the gnome-like, piping-voiced Wally whose most searing expletive seems to be “my gosh”?

Forget it.

His plays, acclaimed for their scathing observations, have also been vilified for their explosive, obscenity-spewing dialogue, for characters bedazzled by all sorts of depravities, for themes with deliberately outrageous slants.

In fact, the uproar over Shawn’s latest, “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” opening Friday at the South Coast Repertory Mainstage in Costa Mesa, has yet to subside. It is not surprising when you have the play’s sweet young heroine lecturing on the glory that was Nazi Germany and the methodology of mass killing. Or that her flaky friend’s bedtime stories are about the joys of sexual debasement and casual killing.

Obviously an ultraprovocative work, “Aunt Dan and Lemon” may be doing its job too well. Viewers have hissed, booed, screamed, walked out or sat in glaring silence.

Nothing could please the author more.

“I don’t want my audiences comfortable and complacent,” Shawn, 44, said by phone last weekend 27)from his New York City flat. “I want them to listen, to think, to challenge (what the characters are saying). I want them to get angry.”

Finding an “audience core” for his plays is “an uphill struggle,” admits Shawn, who earned liberal arts degrees at Harvard and Oxford, taught as a Fulbright fellow in India and who considered a foreign-service career before turning to playwriting at age 24. His father, William Shawn, is the legendary former editor of the New Yorker.

“OK, usually 90% of the people at my plays have made a mistake in coming,” Shawn added. “They don’t have the faintest idea of what’s going on.”

Shawn’s works, as they say, are not for the squeamish. They are laced with cocktail chitchat and voyeuristic images that soar--or sink--to psychologically lethal, dramatically kinky levels. And why not, argues Shawn, who agrees that he writes about “very, very sick people.”

“A Thought in Three Parts” (1977), for example, depicts an orgasmic wonderland, from simulated group sex to sadomasochistic fantasies. And “Marie and Bruce” (1980) is one long, slashing verbal attack by a shrew of a wife with an incredible command of the scatological lexicon.

Not exactly the stuff of “Life With Father.”

Neither is “Aunt Dan and Lemon” (1985), Shawn’s sixth produced work and easily his most widely staged. It has been produced by London’s Royal Court, New York’s Public Theatre and, last year, by Los Angeles’ Taper, Too.

The play is getting the full treatment from South Coast Repertory. SCR co-artistic director Martin Benson is directing; the cast is headed by Nan Martin as the irresistible auntie Danielle and Anni Long as Dan’s wan but winsome disciple, Leonora (Lemon).

The play, set in a London flat, is really a stream of monologues by Dan, an American expatriate, and Lemon, her one-time pupil at Oxford. Both exude fine manners, an educated charm and scrupulous sensibilities.

So far, so good. But their words also conjure monstrous images: Mass slaughter, political venalities, murderous seductions. Dan has a wild obsession for defending Henry Kissinger, her martyred prince of global politicking, from the radical jackals. Lemon has this thing for heaping praise on Hitler’s Third Reich--she says the Nazis are “refreshing” in their “lack of hypocrisy.”

To many critics, “Aunt Dan and Lemon” is about political corruption and societal evils on both grand and minute scales. More to the point, they argue, it is about the acceptance, even nurturing, of such behavior by societies that profess to be moralistic and caring.

Shawn himself sees his play as uncovering the madness beneath the civility. “My play is about those gross rationalizations that people in power and the ordinary citizens use to justify brutal actions.”

The chief target of Shawn’s philosophical assault: An American society that he views as materialistically imperious and politically naive.

Now that “Aunt Dan and Lemon” is playing Orange County, you might think Shawn would leap at the chance to skewer this fortress of affluent conservatism as one of the capitals of complacency.

But he doesn’t see it that way. “You can’t point to any one (American) area as a worst case,” Shawn said. “This is still a very conservative country as a whole, and regional variations in this right-wing status quo aren’t really that big.”

Further, Shawn charged: “We have regressed since Vietnam. Then, the media were much bolder in telling at least part of the truth, and the public was much more willing to listen. We couldn’t ignore it as much then. It was too direct. We had American soldiers committing My Lais.”

Americans since “have become more sophisticated about hiding the ugliness of our actions,” Shawn said.

Shawn still dabbles in movie and television acting--he plays a 1920s gossip columnist in Paris in the forthcoming film “The Moderns”--but the stage remains his primary medium for espousing causes and venting angers.

Still, he would not discuss his next play, nor whether the “extended visit” he is making to Central America now will provide more material for his commentaries on the American mentality abroad.

Instead, he said he wants to discuss something optimistic for a change. He said he has detected a slight but encouraging turnabout in audience response to his plays--namely, “Aunt Dan and Lemon.” “Lately, there seems to be more people who understand what I’m driving at, who are responding to what I’m trying to say,” Shawn said.

Is it possible that recent political events have changed some people’s minds?

“I don’t really know,” Shawn said, “but I’ll tell you it was weird watching the Contra hearings.”

“Hearing the testimony was as if some of (the witnesses) had plagiarized lines right out of my plays,” Shawn said, laughing. “I kept thinking, ‘Hey, I should be getting royalties for this!’ ”

‘AUNT DAN AND LEMON’

Opens Friday, 8 p.m. Through April 7

South Coast Repertory Theatre, Mainstage, Costa Mesa

$18 to $25

Information: (714) 957-4033