The Fever by Wallace Shawn
Directed by G.P. Hunsaker

and

Man With Shotgun by Byron Kerman
Directed by Richard Strelinger
Hydeware Theatre
November 19, 2005

Click here to see a videotaped performance of Man With Shotgun  

Say this for the Tin Ceiling performance space: There’s no place to hide. You can’t help but empathize with an actress who’s standing alone on a tiny, glaringly lit stage surrounded by audience members on both sides, who has to tackle an hour and a half’s worth of dialogue single-handedly.

The author of the one-person show The Fever—renowned playwright and character actor Wallace Shawn—is best known for playing the bald, bumbling kidnapper shouting “Inconceivable!” in William Goldman’s 1987 fantasy film The Princess Bride. While one can picture Shawn in this piece rambling on and on with his quirky humor and trademark voice, he leaves big shoes to fill.

Ember Hyde, a bespectacled redhead with a schoolteacher’s cadence, tries hard to bring Shawn’s words to life. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have much to work with. The performance itself is merely an extended monologue that deconstructs middle-class guilt for abandoning the poor after the world’s failed experiments with communism and socialism. To cure her “sickness,” she travels to poor countries and recounts tales that continually use—and abuse—words like “torture” and “rape.” We don’t know her occupation, her life story, or whether she is addressing a classroom or a mirror. All details are purposefully ambiguous. She is all of us.

Despite the audience’s best attempts to keep from fidgeting, the humorless piece is painfully longwinded. It’s not Hyde’s fault, however; it’s Shawn’s. His goal to provoke and disturb the audience is admirable; what’s not is the continual repetition and utter lack of entertainment value. At best, it’s a brutal exercise best suited for advanced-level acting classes. At worst, it’s boring. If Shawn had swallowed his ego and cut his work to a third its length, he might have won an Obie. Instead Hyde is stuck onstage trying to hit a homerun armed with a twig instead of a baseball bat.

By contrast, Man With Shotgun is everything that The Fever is not: unpredictable, funny, and best of all, short. Brian Hyde (husband to Ember; no need for a casting call in this show) plays a poster child for the National Rifle Association who has been obsessed with firearms ever since he was robbed and beaten during a trip to Chicago. Loaded with phallic symbolism and clever dialogue, the monologue succeeds in freaking out the audience one moment and causing it to erupt into laughter the next, as Hyde explains his innate need to embrace the Second Amendment.

First-time monologist Byron Kerman (who also writes for PLAYBACK:stl) has already learned what Wallace Shawn apparently has not: to respect his audience. Man With Shotgun has every bit as much morality as Fever, but rather than lecture, Kerman leaves his questions for the audience to decide. The result is that you leave the theater ruminating more deeply over the implications of the second performance than the first.