In this masterful epic play, Wallace Shawn takes us down the treacherous path of reasonableness. He's comfortable in his robe and slippers; he sees us, the audience, and welcomes us. Are we flattered when he tells us we look like a box of chocolates, ready to be eaten and enjoyed? Yes! Are we sympathetic with his ambitions as a scientist to solve the greatest problem of humankind: insufficient food? Yes! Are we entertained by stories of sexual prowess and sexual adventure? No surprise: Yes!
Written by Wallace Shawn and directed by Andre Gregory, the play unfolds as a futuristic vision of the accidental destruction of the world. The lead character, Ben, has invented an improvement to the food chain. As audience, we experience the anguish of self-destruction while entertained by Ben's life story in which overt and outlandish sexual behavior is a symptom of the new illness he has imposed on humankind. Is this a mirror of our "reasonable" present-day lives? Frighteningly I must answer, yes. -dp
More from critic John Lahr's 2009 review in the New Yorker Magazine:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2009/06/01/090601crth_theatre_lahr
At the beginning of the three-hour “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” (superbly directed by André Gregory), Shawn is at it again: he stands before us as Ben, a scientist and a memoirist, in a black dressing gown, black monogrammed slippers, and black cravat, and plays his familiar wrong-footing game of self-deprecation. He is dressed as an agent of darkness, but he is bright with good will. “Well. Hello, everybody. Hello! Hello there!” he says, in his lisping, halting, high-pitched voice. He goes on, “When you’re all so nicely sitting there and listening to me, I’m deriving a great deal of pleasure from each and every one of you, as if you were chocolates I was eating.” In this futuristic dream play, eating and being eaten are important leitmotifs. Ben, we learn, is one of the barbarians who have devoured the planet, and, beneath his charm, he is as unrepentant as a hedge-fund manager. “Loaves, with Fishes, for Dinner” is the title of the memoir from which he reads to us, and which hints at his majestic self-infatuation.
Ben is perhaps the most unreliable of Shawn’s many unreliable narrators. His smugness—“I was born lucky”—is rivalled only by the imperialism of his convictions. “We’re fixers, improvers,” he says of his optimistic generation. The thing that he has fixed, it turns out, is the “problem of food.” As he pompously puts it, “There was, on the one hand, an enormous crowd of entities—ourselves and others—roaming the planet, trying to sustain themselves, or, in other words, looking for something to eat; and on the other hand there was a tiny, inadequate crowd of entities available on the planet to be eaten.” The appliance of Ben’s science allows the animal kingdom—frogs, cows, his own dog, Rufus, and, by implication, Homo sapiens—to feed on its own kind, as well as on the corpses of other animals. The discovery has made him rich; it has also destroyed the food chain. Things have gone disastrously wrong: animals are dying, and people are vomiting and keeling over. (jump to link to read complete review)
