The Fever

In this hallucinatory, spiraling narrative, an unnamed upper-middle-class woman from New York wakes up fevered and frightened in the bug-infested hotel room of some war-torn country and begins probing the very foundations on which both her way of living and her way of thinking are based. A Candide of our times, this naïve traveler replays scenes from the past and questions the history of every material object, unable to keep pretending that "we live in a world where coats have no history, but just fall down from heaven with the prices marked inside." The humor is quirky, and the questions are unsettling. They are not meant to be answered, but to bring attention to the shocking landscape of social injustice through which most of us walk every day and almost all of us fail to see. Wallace Shawn’s brilliant text offers a profound and provocative insight into what it means to be a liberal, compassionate individual, and at the same time a member of the privileged class in a rich society whose very existence is based upon the suppression of others less fortunate.