How to Defeat These Thoughts: The Questions of Wallace Shawn
[This essay originally appeared in the Winter 2009/2010 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books . The Winter 2010/2011 issue has been published, so I'm now free to reprint this essay, and I'll also recommend the new issue to you, because in addition to the wide-ranging reviews of books, there are also good interviews with William Gibson and Lewis Hyde.] ANDRE: Well, Wally, how do you think it affects an audience to put on one of these plays in which you show that people are totally isolated now, and they can't reach each other, and their lives are obsessive and driven and desperate? Or how does it affect them to see a play that shows that our world is full of nothing but shocking sexual events and violence and terror? Does that help to wake up a sleeping audience? —Wallace Shawn & André Gregory, My Dinner with André 1. Wallace Shawn's most recent play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors , is a dream and a provocation and a conundrum, but most of all, it i