The Fever (Living Room Edition)
Wallace Shawn‘s riveting monologue, interpreted by theatre no. 6 in the environment for which it was originally intended: your very own living room.
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Cast
The Traveller: Melissa Thingelstad | Ian Leung
Team
Playwright: Wallace Shawn
Directors: Ian Leung | Melissa Thingelstad
Production Design: theatre no. 6
This is a Canadian Actors’ Equity Association production under the Artists’ Collective Policy.
Synopsis
“I’m travelling, and I wake up suddenly in the silence before dawn in a strange hotel room, in a poor country where my language isn’t spoken, and I’m shaking and shivering. – Why?”
Opening line of The Fever, by Wallace Shawn
The Fever is an eighty-minute monologue written to be performed in a living room rather than a theatre. Penned by American playwright and actor Wallace Shawn in 1990, it was partly inspired by a trip he took to Latin America in the 1980s. It’s an impassioned appeal that springs from the heart and inquiring mind of an artist asking hard questions about the way of the world through the persona of a curious traveller who, in the hallucinatory throes of a fever, is brought to a striking realization.
For months Shawn only performed this monologue in the living rooms of friends and acquaintances because he felt that what he wanted to say with his play was less likely to be mistaken for mere entertainment in those intimate environments. When he finally took it to the stage in 1991, it won the Obie Award for best new play.
The Fever has since been performed by numerous actors on stages and in living rooms all over the world. In the twenty-first century it remains current and compelling wherever it is presented. Whether or not it changes your mind, you’ll have a hard time not talking about it with your friends and acquaintances afterward.
theatre no. 6 is proud to present Shawn’s 2012 revision of his original script. The Fever was previously produced by theatre no. 6 at Azimuth Theatre’s Living Room Playhouse in 2014.
The Fever (2014): What Critics Said
theatre no. 6 staged a full production of The Fever at the Living Room Playhouse in the spring of 2014. Scroll down to find out what critics had to say about it.
Melissa Thingelstad in The Fever (2014)
photo by pk photography
QUOTES
It’s challenging, certainly, to confront an audience with, well, itself, especially in a time when theatre seems desperate to shuffle anyone through the doors: but it’s all very skillfully, unflinchingly executed in this theatre no. 6 production.
Paul Blinov
We know Melissa Thingelstad for her intensity and intelligence…which she demonstrated again in theatre no. 6’s account of the Wallace Shawn indictment The Fever.
Liz Nicholls
Thingelstad’s an actress capable of bridging into the emotions necessary to make so much heady, intellectual ruminating affecting, too—and capable of maintaining interest and pace in a 90-minute solo—using an undercurrent of a sense of realization that seems to make us complicit in her thoughts.
Paul Blinov
…both the lighting and the minimalist design here speak to theatrical expertise.
Liz Nicholls
Director Ian Leung finds variety in the approach, too: that chair finds quite a few uses, and though the fourth wall never quite breaks, there are moments when Thingelstad will make and hold eye contact. It’s confrontational, and effective.
Paul Blinov
…riveting to experience.
Liz Nicholls
FULL REVIEWS & PREVIEWS
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