Night Thoughts

by Wallace Shawn

Overview

This “acerbic yet compassionate” meditation on humanity by the acclaimed actor and playwright offers “curiosity, thoughtfulness, sharp logic, deep emotion” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
Beloved actor and Obie Award–winning playwright Wallace Shawn has been an incisive commentator on civilization and its discontents for decades. Now, having recently passed the age of seventy and watched Donald Trump claim the presidency, he offers a late-stage critique of his species, which he sees as being divided between the lucky and the unlucky.
 
In Night Thoughts, Shawn takes the lucky—himself included—to task for their complacency while offering fascinating reflections on “civilization, morality, Beethoven, 11th-century Japanese court poetry, and his hopes for a better world, among other topics” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608468133
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	02/13/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	92
File size:	903 KB

About the Author

Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor (Star Trek, Gossip Girl, The Princess Bride, Toy Story). His plays The Designated Mourner and Marie and Bruce have recently been produced as films. He is co-author of the movie My Dinner with Andre and author of the plays The Fever, The Designated Mourner, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and Grasses of a Thousand Colors. His book Essays was published by Haymarket Books. His play Evening at the Talk House premiered at Socialism 2014

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/03/2017
Shawn (Essays), an actor and Obie-winning playwright, reflects on civilization, morality, Beethoven, 11th-century Japanese court poetry, and his hopes for a better world, among other topics. Acerbic yet compassionate, Shawn’s meditations epitomize qualities he admires—curiosity, thoughtfulness, sharp logic, deep emotion—and sees getting short shrift in a United States abandoning “the cultivation of the intellect.” Born to privilege, he admits to being one of the “lucky,” a group encompassing “a very large number of the citizens of the United States and Great Britain and most European countries” who largely owe their prosperity to the “unjust exploitation” of the “unlucky.” And although he, for various reasons, proved “downwardly mobile” (his position in society is lower than his parents’), he knows his “luck has held.” With impeccable logic, he gently, but lethally, skewers the complacency of the lucky while highlighting the plight of the less fortunate, including the Muslims living in the slums of European cities, the maid of a wealthy friend, and a boy at a dance who shoots someone flirting with his girlfriend. And he is quick to confront his own privileged status after a “big storm” when he’s faced with days of no running water or heat—and no one coming to fix things—and feels disoriented, “as if a lifetime’s worth of assumptions were uncontrollably unspooling.” (June)

Publishers Weekly

[Shawn is] the American theatre’s most insistent class traitor.” —The New Yorker

"A compelling diagnosis of the world 's injustice but also a very personal response to that injustice." —San Francisco Chronicle

"With wit and wisdom to spare, Night Thoughts is a subversive gem of an essay, which ought to appeal beyond those who already convinced that radical change is needed. Even for those people, a well judged and cleverly argued piece such as this can be restorative and inspiring. Either way, it would surely be beneficial to us all if it received the very wide audience that it deserves." —Counterfire

"With impeccable logic, [Shawn] gently, but lethally, skewers the complacency of the lucky while highlighting the plight of the less fortunate, including the Muslims living in the slums of European cities, the maid of a wealthy friend, and a boy at a dance who shoots someone flirting with his girlfriend." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Shawn has a way of pulling the reader into conversation, making the experience of Night Thoughts feel like more than moving through an extended essay by an important American playwright and actor. Somewhere, as one reads it, the feeling of friendship appears, as if Shawn has known you for years, and now, late in his life, he's decided to tell you what it's all about." —Shelf Awareness

"There is a sense of urgency about this turn to prose, as if Shawn had begun to sense, despairingly, that it is no longer enough to put words in the mouths of fictional characters, that he can no longer wait around for us to figure out what it is he is trying to tell us." —Long Reads

"[L]ike riffs of free-form jazz." —New York Journal of Books

Praise for Essays:

"Lovely, hilarious and seriously thought-provoking." —Toni Morrison

"Wallace Shawn 's essays are both powerful and riveting. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing." —Michael Moore

"From a low-earning playwright 's troubles to reflections on why the Palestinians are justified in their resentment of Israel. Wallace Shawn: Fearless!" —GQ, Best Books of 2009

"It ''s a treat to hear [Shaun] speak his curious mind." —O, The Oprah Magazine

From the Publisher

2017-03-28
The acclaimed actor and playwright offers a brief, disturbing meditation on the "story of civilization.""I'm upset about what my species has turned out to be—the species that went mad and destroyed the planet," writes Shawn (Essays, 2010, etc.) in this jeremiad about the state of humanity. Anyone who has seen the author's plays knows that he is drawn to the dark side of existence, and the current political climate has darkened his mood further. After spending a night watching TV news in a hotel room, he wonders if the world will ever stop rewarding "people like Trump, whose frighteningly bloated, distended, almost-bursting egos and paranoid eyes scanning the horizon for enemies seem to thrill so many people." That's all the impetus needed for Shawn—who grew up privileged in a fancy New York apartment with rooms "full of ashtrays and bourbon" and with a father, New Yorker editor William Shawn, who believed that civilization was justified because it produced Beethoven—to expound upon the ills of modern society. He packs a lot into 80 pages, including discussions of the Islamic State, Yemen, Osama bin Laden, 9/11, Marxism, and the diminishment of morality. The world, writes the author, is divided into the lucky and the unlucky. The latter have a perpetual grievance against the former, which is why no one should be surprised when, say, followers of Islam rise up against Western powers or when British and European Muslims react against "the suffering of fellow Muslims in Gaza or Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan." Shawn offers suggestions for a better civilization but with the caveat that he doubts such a world will ever come about. Though the narrative structure feels random at times, readers can't deny the veracity of the author's claims, and many will share his anger when he writes about "egomaniacs who are always ready to scoop up power for their own warped purposes." Not an optimistic picture but perceptive and forcefully argued.

Kirkus Reviews