Lars Norén, the former head of the National Theater in Stockholm, will direct a new French production of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, to run at La MaMa, January 24-February 3.
The one-woman show will star French-Romanian actress Simona Maicanescu, who has adapted the play with Norén drawing both from Shawn’s original text, written in 1990, and his 2007 rewrite. The work is the tale of an upper-middle-class woman from New York who wakes up in a bug-infested hotel room in some war-torn country and begins probing both her way of living and her way of thinking.
Shawn is a two time Obie winner, whose many works as a playwright include Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and The Designated Mourner. Noren’s plays include Autumn and Winter, Blood, War, and Night Is Mother To The Day. Since 1993 he has directed for the theater, staging plays by Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Ibsen, and Chekhov, among others. Macianescu’s acting credits include Norén’s War, Molière’s Tartuffe, and the French TV series Engrenages.