Politics and High Art Collide inWallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner

A staged reading of The Designated Mourner by Wallace Shawn will be presented at 243 Rosedale St. (New Life Presbyterian Church) on Friday February 27th at 8:00pm. Tickets are free and the event is open to the public. For more information, call (585) 271-5523 or visit www.BreadandWaterTheatre.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January, 1 2009
Contact: J.R. Teeter
Artistic Director
585.271.5523
JR@BreadandWaterTheatre.org

When Stalin came to power in late 1930s one of his first act of power was to imprison and kill all those who stood in his way. Many disappeared on trumped up charges with one of the most well known victims being Vsevolod Meyerhold, a well-known Russian intellectual and theatre director. Stalin’s police forced their way into his home and gauged out the eyes of his wife, a famous Russian actress known for her eyes, and Meyerhold was later arrested. He described his torture in letters. “I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap... For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain… When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour's time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.” Meyerhold was executed by firing squad in February of 1940.

Around the same time of Meyerhold’s execution, Nazi Germany was instituting a policy of forced coercin called Gleichschaltung (“bringing into line”) that eliminated descention. Those who did not adhere to the new Nazi regime risked arrested, torture or forced labor in a concentration camp.

Some of the most recent examples of this sort of purging is the Rwandan Genocide in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein’s Al-Anfal campaign and Halabja massacre in Irag and the events that transpire in Wallace Shawn’s play The Designated Mourner.

The play takes place during an unknown time and in a country that is never named. During the course of the play, the ruling dictatorship in fear of being overthrown, begins to target anyone suspected of subversion, including writers and intellectuals. One of the latter is Howard, a respected poet who wrote political essays in his youth; his daughter Judy and her husband Jack are also at risk of becoming suspects by association. Jack, an embittered English professor, is the play's chief narrator. He is generally uninterested in politics, but is somewhat sympathetic toward the government's murderous acts, for two reasons: he secretly resents Howard as a representative of "highbrow" culture, and he fears that his middle-class world would be wiped out if anti-government factions succeed. As political repression worsens, Jack withdraws from his family and from reality. Howard is killed due to an arbitrary decision by the government, Judy is arrested and subsequently executed for unclear reasons, and Jack, after recovering from his nervous breakdown, is left as the sole survivor of Howard's literary circle.

The playwright, Wallace Shawn, was featured in the films The Princess Bride and Clueless and argued so memorably with Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre, is nearly as prolific a playwright as he is an actor. His oft-staged Marie And Bruce, as well as A Thought In Three Parts, Aunt Dan and Lemon and translation of Machiavelli's The Mandrake all played at NYC's Public Theatre, and his The Hotel Play was staged at La MaMa in 1981. Mr. Shawn can most recently be seen in Showtime’s The L Word and Gossip Girl playing supporting roles.

The cast includes: Elliot Fox (Jack), Annette Lorenzo (Judy) and Nathanial Dudley (Howard). Mr. Dudley is making a return performance at BWT most recently appeared in a production of Lambda Project: Au Natural. Ms. Lorenzo is a stand-up comedienne by trade, a board member of Women in Film and Television and making her BWT debut. Also making his debut is Mr. Fox who has active in the world of improv with Barrel of Monkeys in Brockport, NY.

Founded in 2000, Bread & Water Theatre is committed to making the arts accessible and affordable to a broad-based audience and acting as a positive agent of change in its community. Under the artistic direction of J.R. Teeter, BWT develops theatre that speaks to our living, evolving, and dramatically changing world through new and rare works of drama, and aspires to be a major force in American theatre, providing audiences with challenging contemporary drama and innovative community outreach programs.

A staged reading of The Designated Mourner by Wallace Shawn will be presented at 243 Rosedale St. (New Life Presbyterian Church) on Friday February 27th at 8:00pm. Tickets are free and the event is open to the public. For more information, call (585) 271-5523 or visit www.BreadandWaterTheatre.org.