STAGE : Wallace Shawn Turns Up the Heat : The actor/playwright, who enjoys making his audiences uncomfortable, is bringing his one-man ‘Fever’ to Los Angeles

Actor-playwright Wallace Shawn once told an interviewer: “I actually believe that what we Americans are doing in the world is wrong. So, even though I have this moderately affable personality in person, I have no interest in leaving an American audience feeling great. I don’t think they should feel great.”

In Shawn’s newest work, “The Fever,” his unnamed protagonist doesn’t feel very well at all. In fact, he (or she--Shawn maintains that the role has no age or sex specifications) finds himself violently ill on the floor of a hotel bathroom in a foreign country. A revolution is going on outside.

“The lamp by my bed doesn’t work,” he tells us. “. . . I get up, light the candle, take the candle into the bathroom. Then I put the candle in its holder on the floor, and I kneel down in front of the toilet and vomit. . . .” The sight of a fat water bug wriggling into a tiny hole and disappearing reminds him of himself, of the good life he’s lived as a member of a privileged class.

There’s a little bit of Kafka’s merciless self-dissection in “The Fever,” and a little bit of Albert Camus’ “The Plague” in its alarm over a pullulant evil condition, except that Shawn’s discomfort isn’t externalized, or distributed among different characters. There is only his preoccupation with this alien, plundered species--the poor--and this bit of knowledge that sits like a boulder in the middle of his road to enlightenment: “The life I live is irredeemably corrupt. It has no justification.”

Is the play autobiographical? In Shawn’s company, you quickly know the question won’t get you far. It is and it isn’t. That is, he’s lived in India, Mexico and Nicaragua, and he’s a child of East Coast comfort, if not affluence. He’s also a paragon of tactical evasiveness, compounded by his noticeable difficulty--the classic writer’s dilemma--at finding the right word in conversation. Listening to him struggle to express himself is a wringing experience, like watching someone try to catch a fish in a tank with his bare hands.

“I am rather disappointed with my inability to say things about this piece,” he said of the work in which he appears at MOCA’s Ahmanson Auditorium beginning May 21. “When I started writing this piece, I was really, uh, not thinking about theater. I was not thinking that it’d be done in a theater. It was my idea that it could be performed by almost any performer in any space. A home. An empty room. Anywhere. Of course, when I say any performer, they have to be up to learning a monologue which is two hours long. Also, it could be read, for those people who prefer it in that form . . . they could just . . . read it.”

(“The Fever” has been published in a volume by Noonday Press.)

This is the way Shawn’s discourse works, like a tongue slowly teasing a cavity. Its roundabout earnestness, as seen in the film “My Dinner With Andre,” is comical and endearing, as is his appearance. At 47, his stature is short, his pale skin is fresh and unlined and his gray eyes are both cagey and humorous. He has an epicurean mouth and smallish hands with short, blunt fingers, which he tends to keep closed, like a card shark. He has a lisp. With his balding crown, he beams like a monk who takes suspicious delight in his task at the winery.

This is one monk with a pipeline into infernal regions, however. In our seemingly shock-proof age, audiences have nonetheless been made squeamish by the savage vilifications of a wife towards her passive husband in Shawn’s “Marie and Bruce.” And just how do you answer the praise lavished on the Nazis for “their refreshing lack of hypocrisy” in “Aunt Dan and Lemon”? For we do have to reply. One of Shawn’s characteristic techniques is to turn restless, probing or bizarre monologues loose among characters who don’t quite respond to each other directly, which takes us out of the traditional role of onlookers and forces us into a sense of imbalance where we have to come up with answers.

“He’s an authentically provocative playwright,” said Robert Egan, associate artistic director of the CTG/Mark Taper Forum, and director of “Aunt Dan and Lemon” at Taper, Too in 1987.

“His belief is that residing in all of us is a voice of morality, justice and compassion for others in our species regardless of race or economics, and he’s obsessed with what it means when we dislocate ourselves from that voice. Another characteristic thing about Wally is this wonderful collision of sensibilities. He’s a member of the intelligentsia, capable of speculation and analysis, but his main concern is with ethical issues, like, ‘How do I live my life?,’ ‘How do I live up to my standard of expectations?’ Into this mix he puts a whimsical, anarchic sensibility, a verbal Chaplinesque quality.”

Shawn first unveiled “The Fever” by playing it in “various apartments, mostly in New York, in front of small groups of 10 to 12 people” before moving it to larger and larger homes, including mansions. “It was . . . it’s quite frightening,” he said, recalling the play’s passage through its various venues. “Why do I subject myself to that?” But the playing spaces were consistent with Shawn’s self-presentation as “one member of a certain of the more privileged class of society directly addressing other members of that same class.” “The Fever” had its first legitimate run at New York’s Public Theater in late 1990, played London briefly in February and moved back to the Public’s Second Stage for another run that ended in March.

Shawn was sitting in the restaurant of a small Hollywood hotel, dressed in a white shirt whose collar folded out over a black pullover. His Kelly green and black plaid lumber jacket was draped over the back of his chair. He sipped a glass of grapefruit juice as he struggled with his words.

“He’s someone clearly sensitive to the nuances of his psychological condition, but the subject is not psychological,” he said of “The Fever’s” narrator. “It’s quite the opposite. He doesn’t learn things about his psychological problems. He learns in this moment of perception, his seeing himself from outside, of how he’s viewed by a poor or oppressed person indifferent to his psychological problem. The piece is really about money.”

The statement, and Shawn’s intent effort to express it, is characteristic of the truths he tries to articulate and the circuitous, comically painful way he utters them. “I would like people to come to it without knowing too much about it,” he added, before extrapolating “The Fever” onto a larger landscape in saying:

“We Americans have the nerve and effrontery not only to savagely protect our interests, but to insist that we be paid and complimented at the same time for being warm-hearted and humanitarian. We are used to reading about the crimes of the Russians or the Chinese and enjoying the feeling that so many terrible things that were being done in the world were not our fault. Now that we’re living in this New World Order with just one superpower, that kind of fantasy may be less available to us.”

Pressed for more details about the background of the piece, Shawn said: “I loved being in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. I personally felt a deep contentment there based on the feeling that maybe things could be done better. And obviously in a certain way I felt more at home in a country where the vice president was an incredibly sensitive novelist than in a country where the vice president was George Bush.

“I feel a certain peace in Mexico too that I don’t feel here. To me, the Gulf War expressed our country’s anxiety about the fact that the poor people in the world may start to get very rambunctious . . . and that Bush and his people are serving notice that we will react swiftly and savagely to any unrest, or let’s say towards any way that they behave disobediently, or in a way deemed inappropriate.”

Shawn’s background would not, on the surface, appear to be one that feeds a smoldering anger towards the American ruling class, particularly because by nature of his birth and upbringing he’s moved so easily among its ranks. He’s the son of William Shawn, former editor of the New Yorker magazine and discreetly steadfast caretaker of its rigorously genteel, liberal tradition.

To be the son of an eminent parent (he has a younger brother, the composer Allen Shawn) often means one of two things: Either one lives a lifetime of paralyzing self-doubt in forever failing to measure up to an exalted parent, or one lives with the consciousness of advantage. Wallace Shawn falls into the latter category. Any compliment or favor that comes his way he takes as his natural due.

“I never wrote for the New Yorker, but when people congratulated me on a particularly good issue, I’d accept the praise. I was always aware of being treated specially, that because people were interested in my parent, they’d be interested in me. I routinely accepted compliments.”

Shawn grew up on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side and went to prep school in Vermont before going on to Harvard as a history major, and then to Oxford University, where he read in philosophy, politics and economics.

It was at Oxford that he wrote his first play. “The theater had always meant a lot to me since I was a boy. When I was 12 I saw Jason Robards do ‘The Iceman Cometh’ at the Circle-in-the-Square. The next year I saw ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ and ‘Endgame’ and ‘The Chairs.’ Even more overwhelming was Ionesco’s ‘Jack,’ with Salome Jens. I was 13. I’ll never forget Salome Jens,” he said with an unmistakable gleam in his eye.

An Oxford drama contest prompted his entry, called “Four Meals in May.” It did not win. “Let’s just say it was subtle to the vanishing point,” he recalls. Still, he was hooked. After a teaching stint in India, he returned to New York to begin writing in earnest.

“I must say I had a strange belief in myself, which was much more confident than anything I could feel today,” he said. “I didn’t receive much external encouragement at that time. If I hadn’t done a lot of internal back-slapping, I just would’ve quit. I had a kind of arrogance that came from being raised in an encouraging way and going to schools where teachers were paid to flatter you.”

To support himself during his early playwrighting days, Shawn worked as a schoolteacher, a shipping clerk, a Xerox machine operator, and lived off the financial largess of friends. (“At that time I thought that somehow if my plays were performed, I’d make a living and be able to pay back my friends. Of course this was a ridiculous idea, but I didn’t know that.”) His first produced work was the 1975 production of “Our Late Night” at the Public Theater. (An earlier work, called “A Thought in Three Parts” was performed in workshop at the Public, and remains, even by Shawn’s generally unrestrictive standards, “a shocking work that dealt with sex.”)

In 1977, director Wilford Leach commissioned Shawn to do a translation of Machiavelli’s “The Mandrake,” and cast Shawn as an actor in a small part. Casting director Juliet Taylor saw him in it and recommended him for one of her chief clients, Woody Allen, who put him to work in the film “Manhattan,” which began Shawn’s small but lucrative acting career in movies and TV (he’s done “Taxi” and three episodes of “The Cosby Show”). “Let the record show that I could’ve been a millionaire if I wanted to be,” he said with a proud smile.

Though he travels a great deal of the time as “faculty husband” to his great and good friend, writer Deborah Eisenberg, the theater remains the most enticing darkroom in which he puzzles through his dilemmas, even though, “most of the time I feel it’s just absurd, like ‘Why am I watching these people setting up dilemmas that they don’t really have and then resolving them?’

“The challenge as a writer is, how can you say in living words things that have been said for so long that they become dead to us? I’ve come to believe that leading our ordinary middle class life unfortunately involves you in doing active harm to other people, that the world is, to all important extents, a closed system at any given moment.”

Shawn’s very good fortune is that he has never seriously had to worry over a life lived outside that system. “The Fever” represents his imaginative sympathy with those who do.