Cast
The Traveller: Ian Leung
Production
Playwright: Wallace Shawn
Director: Melissa Thingelstad
Production Design: theatre no. 6
This is a Canadian Actors’ Equity Association production under the Artists’ Collective Policy.
Inquiries
Use the e-mail form below to make inquiries.
Check out the FAQ section below for further details, including cost, running time, and the show’s content warning.
A fascinating play! And this is how Shawn conceived it should be done: up close.
Liz Nicholls
Live theatre in your LIVING ROOM!!! Such an amazing, thought provoking night with Ian Leung and The Fever. Bring it to your home.
Mike Hudema
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 a one-person play that was originally performed in living rooms rather than in a theatre. Penned by American playwright and actor Wallace Shawn in 1990, it was partly inspired by his visit to strife-torn countries in 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 to who, in the hallucinatory throes of a fever, is brought to a staggering realization.
The audience witnesses the traveller’s experience of this fever in real time, from the minute it strikes to the provocative confession that comes moments after it breaks. In the interim, the traveller, a natural raconteur, struggles to resolve a troubling fascination with “the poor”. It all takes place in the confines of a room in a strange hotel in a poor country where the traveller’s language isn’t spoken, but the window that The Fever opens on the way that the world works is as wide as the world itself, and the view that it offers might just change your life.
The Fever won the Obie Award for best new play after Shawn finally brought it to the stage in 1991. But for months before that, he would only perform it in the living rooms of friends and acquaintances because he felt that in that context, what he wanted to say was less likely to be mistaken for mere entertainment.
Since then, The Fever has been performed by numerous actors on stages and in living rooms all over the world. Now, in the twenty-first century it remains current and urgently compelling. Whether or not it changes your life, you’ll have a hard time not debating its point-of-view with your friends and acquaintances after hearing it.
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.
For more information about Wallace Shawn and The Fever, Shawn’s 2012 interview in the Paris Review offers an excellent introduction.
Melissa Thingelstad in The Fever (2014)
photo by pk photography
Production History
Wallace Shawn‘s riveting monologue was presented by theatre no. 6 in 2016 in the environment for which it was originally intended: the living rooms of people’s homes.
The Living Room Edition of The Fever is currently on hiatus but may be returning soon. Please stay tuned. Inquiries are still welcome!
Booking Windows:
The Fever (Living Room Edition) was performed in the living rooms of homes in Edmonton in the fall of 2016.
Venue:
Private living rooms of Edmonton hosts.
Cost:
$20* per person
(minimum audience: 6 people)
*Pay-What-You-Can was also an option upon request.
Raise Money for Your Favourite Cause
A portion of the proceeds generated by a performance of The Fever in your home can be donated to your favourite cause.
The amount donated rises with the proceeds. A modest donation of $20 can be made when proceeds are $120. When admissions exceed $300, as much as 50% or more of the proceeds can be gifted.
As verification that a donation has been made, the host will receive, in their name, a certificate of acknowledgement from the registered charity that is the recipient of their gift.
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. Here’s what critics had to say about it.
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.