From left, Matthew Broderick, John Epperson, Wallace Shawn, seated, and Claudia Shear in Mr. Shawn’s “Evening at the Talk House” at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
"The banality of evil."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/theater/evening-at-the-talk-house-review.html?_r=0
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"I love how Wallace Shawn's writing begins with the simplest premise: people in a context. He cloaks the people with everything familiar to us, the audience, because it's a reflection of the way we live now. He shows us who we are, now. He mirrors the things we think are important; the misconceptions that we promote or hide; the ways that we are, perhaps minutely, cruel to fellow humans. In this same way he begins with a social context equally familiar to our present, even pointing out to us, in Talk House, that we are playing the part of "the audience" and are watching a play. And "this is the way aging actors talk about their careers and their comrades and competitors on the stage."
From familiar turf, Mr. Shawn moves us as smoothly as the ticking of a clock into future time - a future that extrapolates our behaviors as if they have profound future implications if unchecked.
In "Talk House," the dystopian future seems to be only about 10 years from the present. People have become obsessed with the idea of real/imagined threats and personalized danger posed by individuals around the world. Informants have become all-powerful. Distrust of one's fellow human beings has destroyed things like the theater and the former pleasant social club known as the Talk House. Retaliation against undesirable people is extreme: sophisticated poisons and drone-driven micro-bombs are used to commit murder. The job of being a killer has become ubiquitous: any individual with some free time and who needs a part time job can become a paid murderer.
The play is sprinkled with humor as we laugh at ourselves, our foibles, our penchant for verbal punishment of friends and foes alike. The theater is dead for a reason in this dystopian future: it is no longer safe to be oneself and to express oneself. In this new world, kindness itself becomes the greatest human flaw." --dp
