Volume 45, Number 13 · August 13, 1998
The Masked Avenger
By Fintan O'Toole
Four Plays
by Wallace Shawn
The Noonday Press, 228 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Designated Mourner
by Wallace Shawn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 103 pp., $19.00
More often than not, newspaper and magazine stories about Wallace Shawn begin with the notion that he is really two people. One is a familiar if quirky presence in American popular culture, an actor whose distinctive looks, wry demeanor, and lisping, querulous voice fade in and out of prime time television and popular movies. He has been a recurring character in sitcoms such as Taxi and The Cosby Show. He played Candice Bergen's unbearable former colleague in Murphy Brown and Mr. Hall, the lovelorn high school teacher, in both the movie Clueless and the television series it spawned. He was Zek the Grand Magus in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In movies, he has played a mad scientist, a man from outer space, a creepy arms dealer, a small-time crook. He was the Masked Avenger in Woody Allen's Radio Days and the voice of Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story. As the narrator of Shawn's own one-actor play The Fever puts it: 'There's never enough solace, never enough consolation. I'm doing whatever I possibly can. I try to be nice. I try to be lighthearted, entertaining, funny. I tell entertaining stories to people.'
Review, 4628 words
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