STAGE REVIEW : ‘The Fever’ Cooled by Self-Flagellation

Even as Wallace Shawn was milling about the audience Tuesday in the anteroom of MOCA’s Ahmanson Auditorium, something about the writer-performer’s persona suggested that we should pay attention.

A little later, the author of “Aunt Dan and Lemon” (perhaps better known for his role on and off camera in the movie “My Dinner With Andre”) took a few hesitant minutes to prepare his audience for the impending recitation of his solo piece, “The Fever”--written, he told us, “to be performed by any performer just about anywhere.”

Shawn himself began by performing “The Fever” in living rooms, until, he said, he realized that “I’m not making a dent in all these apartments” and switched to theaters--”an excuse for sitting in the dark for a long time without anybody criticizing you.” It’s clear that the womb-like, solitary dark is where Shawn, by natural inclination, prefers to be.

He is not a spotlight person. That was evident as he sat bathed in light on the Ahmanson stage.

Born to comfort and privilege, Shawn is bothered by existential questions surrounding both. He does not easily suffer the gift of easy living. Round, balding and bright, he has a clown’s basic discontent. Even his pre-performance banter Tuesday reflected a reluctance to drink deep at the well. Someone else, after all, might be drinking shallow.

That concern--others might call it obsession--is what “The Fever” is about: a lengthy discourse on behavioral morality. It’s not quite a lecture, because Shawn is too much of a poet to be so overtly dogmatic, but it’s not far from one.

Sitting still in his chair, never moving from it, Shawn tells us of waking suddenly in that treacherous “silence before dawn in a strange hotel room, in a poor country where my language isn’t spoken” and remembering an execution “far away, in a different country. . . .” And we’re off.

Delivered by candlelight on that cold hotel bathroom floor between bouts of vomiting, the rest is a ramble through “the inner life versus the outward circumstance,” Marxism versus capitalism, the regard of poverty versus property, the price of a coat versus the value of the lives and labor it took to make it.

The growing consciousness of accrued human suffering eventually obliterates the flavorful details of middle class life. The speaker--be it Shawn or anyone else--finds it less and less possible to taste anything, enjoy anything, feel anything, not even the simplest aesthetic pleasures of daily living.

The “fever” has taken hold.

Shawn is careful to name no names--no countries, no persons, no revolutions. This paradoxically emphasizes the personal alienation, but distances the piece. Once in a while a sallow guerrilla fighter will have a first name, but friends and relations remain anonymous, faceless, even genderless. So does the speaker--man or woman.

Is this theater? Only in the rudimentary sense of ideas and a body moving (however little) in space. It is theater at its least theatrical. It is also self-flagellation in the guise of philosophical inquiry. Camus and Kafka had a hand in generating that sort of thing, but what “The Fever” comes closest to, though not necessarily consciously so, is Sartre’s “La Nausee.” Both deal with existential paralysis--material that is easier to read than to listen to.

In the end, “The Fever” is more memorable as a curiosity than an evening of theater. One is curious to see Shawn on stage and curious to hear what he has to say. Semi-confessional pieces are always alluring. But in the end there is not more here, and perhaps a little less, than one might surmise or suspect.

Could it be done differently than from the dramatically sterile territory of a chair? Probably, but this is Shawn’s considered choice. The asceticism of the presentation is intentional. Anyone going to see “The Fever” should know the circumstance. This is a cogitative occasion that requires you to sit for “something under two hours” without intermission, listening to the sound of one head swimming.

* “The Fever,” Ahmanson Auditorium, Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Tuesdays-Sundays., 8 p.m. Ends June 1. $15. (213) 972-7392. Running time: 1 hour,45 minutes.

‘The Fever’

Wallace Shawn performs his one-man show. Presented by the Mark Taper Forum in association with MOCA. Producer Robert Egan.