Como Wallace Shawn encontrou sua voz

Uma entrevista com o ator, dramaturgo e socialista Wallace Shawn.

Uma entrevista com

Wallace Shawn

Jacobin

Still de The Princess Bride.

Entrevista de
Jason Farbman

À primeira vista, o rosto de Wallace Shawn transporta você. Se você assistiu a filmes ou televisão nos últimos quarenta anos, certamente há algum marco cultural que você ama profundamente, no qual Shawn desempenhou um papel inesquecível. Dependendo da sua idade, pode ser Gossip Girl, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Clueless, The Princess Bride, ou My Dinner with Andre, filme que ele também escreveu. Na rua, crianças que o ouvem falar imediatamente reconhecem a voz do Rex, o dinossauro de Toy Story.

Shawn também é dramaturgo, e seu trabalho sempre ultrapassou os limites da zona de conforto dos ricos e abastados para expor sua cumplicidade na degradação da sociedade. Apenas alguns meses após o início do governo Trump, duas de suas obras antigas sobre a vida sob regimes totalitários ganharam novas montagens: Evening at the Talk House, em Nova York, e The Designated Mourner, em Los Angeles. Cada uma delas recebeu muito mais atenção da imprensa hoje do que quando foram encenadas pela primeira vez sob governos democratas (Obama, em 2015, e Clinton, em 1996, respectivamente).

Além de peças teatrais, Shawn é ensaísta e acaba de publicar seu segundo livro, "Night Thoughts", que explora o capitalismo, o extremismo, a revolução e a punição, entre outros temas. Ele é um socialista declarado, tendo participado dos primeiros esforços para libertar Chelsea Manning, sendo um defensor ativo dos palestinos e membro do conselho consultivo da organização Jewish Voice for Peace.

Jason Farbman, da revista Jacobin, conversou com Wallace Shawn sobre o papel que a arte e os artistas podem — e não podem — desempenhar na construção de movimentos políticos, e sobre como um ator famoso se tornou um socialista declarado.

"Night Thoughts"

Jason Farbman

Em "Night Thoughts", você deixa muito claro que a humanidade precisa desesperadamente de um sistema social completamente diferente. Em um tema que parece ser recorrente em sua obra, você dedica um tempo a discutir o potencial tragicamente inexplorado de tantas pessoas.

Wallace Shawn

O fato mais negligenciado sobre o mundo é que todas as pessoas que vemos quando caminhamos por aí todos os dias, ou quando ligamos a televisão, não estavam inevitavelmente destinadas a ser como são hoje. Partimos do princípio de que, seja como for, as pessoas nasceram assim e jamais poderiam ter sido diferentes. Encontramos pessoas que parecem terrivelmente limitadas de diversas maneiras e pensamos: "Que pena", mas, em um sistema social diferente, elas não seriam assim.

Você pode dizer: "Nem todo bebê nasce com o potencial para ser um gênio como Noam Chomsky". Não sei se isso é verdade ou não. Mas certamente todos que vemos poderiam ter sido muito, muito diferentes do que são, e até mais do que são.

A dura realidade é que pessoas privilegiadas veem aqueles que nasceram sem privilégios, que não tiveram uma criação e educação privilegiadas, como pertencentes essencialmente a uma espécie diferente. Para ser franco, pessoas privilegiadas enxergam a maioria das pessoas que veem e conhecem, os não privilegiados, como criaturas que nasceram com um grau de inteligência inferior ao delas, simplesmente porque os não privilegiados falam de forma diferente, se vestem de forma diferente, consomem produtos culturais diferentes, etc.

Pessoas privilegiadas presumem que os menos privilegiados são menos privilegiados justamente por terem nascido com um nível de inteligência inferior. Essa é a análise sociológica inconsciente delas. Mesmo aquelas pessoas privilegiadas que refletiram sobre o assunto e sabem que isso não é verdade são incapazes de manter essa consciência no dia a dia. Não é algo em que tenham tempo para pensar. Pessoas privilegiadas pensam: “Eu nasci inteligente. É por isso que sou advogado ou dramaturgo. O cara que faz meu sanduíche nasceu menos inteligente. É por isso que ele faz sanduíches, trafica drogas e acaba na prisão.”

Jason Farbman

Night Thoughts é um livro sobre capitalismo, classe e revolução. E, no entanto, você não usa uma única vez as palavras “trabalhador” ou “capitalista”. Isso me lembrou seu ensaio anterior, “Why I Call Myself a Socialist”, que não apresenta uma única menção às palavras “capitalismo” ou “socialista”. E, no entanto, essas são duas obras profundamente impactantes sobre as vidas, as oportunidades e os talentos negados a tantas pessoas sob o capitalismo.

Wallace Shawn

Bem, você precisa perguntar: o que é um escritor? Para mim, o papel social de um escritor é, em parte, tentar evitar o descuido e a preguiça na forma como usamos as palavras, porque vivemos em um mundo de grande confusão intelectual. As pessoas intimidam e manipulam umas às outras usando uma linguagem muito vaga e tentando, na prática, enganar as pessoas para que concordem com elas. Portanto, para mim, os escritores devem tentar ter certeza de que tanto seus leitores quanto eles próprios realmente entendam o que estão dizendo. Para mim, ajuda usar palavras simples, tentar evitar clichês e ficar longe de palavras e frases cujos significados são controversos ou obscuros. Não é útil usar frases indefinidas que podem significar muitas coisas diferentes. A maioria das pessoas não sabe o que significa a palavra "capitalismo". E entre aqueles que sabem, a definição é controversa.

Acho que, se tenho algum talento, provavelmente reside em explicar certas coisas para pessoas que ainda não as compreendem. Não acho impossível que eu diga algumas coisas que possam influenciar alguém — pelo menos alguém que seja parecido com o que eu era — a seguir o caminho que trilho hoje. Então, não quero começar alienando essas pessoas. Não quero usar frases que façam as pessoas pensarem: "Bem, ele é membro de um clube exclusivo ao qual eu não pertenço".

Também não é assim que eu falo. Estou tentando falar com a minha própria voz. "Pensamentos Noturnos" é bem curto porque contém tudo o que penso, tudo o que acredito poder expressar com clareza e sobre o que acho que estou certo. Se houvesse mais coisas, provavelmente estariam no livro, que talvez tivesse 650 páginas.

Jason Farbman

Você usa as palavras "os sortudos" e "os azarados".

Wallace Shawn

Dizer "sortudos" e "azarados" é uma descrição bastante precisa das pessoas do mundo. Também não uso palavras que me identifiquem com uma seita específica. Claro, sou de esquerda e poderia usar termos de esquerda. Mas por que deveria? Também venho de uma família judaica. Poderia salpicar meus textos com expressões em iídiche, mas não é meu estilo. Se você faz isso demais, está dizendo: "Isto foi escrito para um determinado grupo de pessoas, por um deles".

Jason Farbman

Throughout the book, you are making structural arguments, and about people being compelled in certain directions. It was interesting to me how you traced this line of thinking to a discussion of punishment, about what to do with capitalists after the revolution.

Why are you thinking about what to do with the rich after the revolution?

Wallace Shawn

Well, I believe in radical change. I don’t think the rich should rule the world, as they do now. But if a different system should replace the current one, the character of the new system will be determined to an important degree by how it treats those over whom it would then have power, the former rulers. I don’t believe in revenge or even really in punishment, and I think that people who take revenge against formerly powerful monsters become at that moment powerful monsters themselves. Of course I’m a member of the bourgeoisie, and so are most of the people I know and love, so you might suspect my motives when I say these things. You could say I’m trying to protect the asses of the bourgeoisie, and my own ass is one of the ones I’m protecting. But I can’t deny my own beliefs simply because someone might suspect my motives. Those are my beliefs.

I don’t believe in punishing the poor. And I don’t believe in punishing the rich, either. I don’t believe in punishing the innocent. And I don’t really believe in punishing the guilty. I realize that leaves a lot of questions on the table that I don’t resolve in the book. For instance, what do we do with serial killers, who are driven to commit murder again and again? There must be some way we can cope with those people. We don’t want them to kill everyone.

Punishment of some kind is a very articulate way for society to express its disapproval of certain actions. There should be some way that society can express its disapproval of what was done. But I don’t really believe in punishment, because I think it’s based on an erroneous idea of how people make decisions. Person A decides to murder Person B. Well, a lot of forces go into what we call “a decision,” and a lot of those forces are unconscious and not under the control of the person making the decision. Blaming the murderer assumes that he could have behaved differently. It’s hard to prove that.

Jason Farbman

You discuss a revolution that can upend capitalism, globally. It’s a task so enormous it can be impossible to imagine: conquering the greatest military powers the world has ever seen; taking control of the running of society; and the organization of working people across the world to cooperate in these tasks. These more practical aspects are what most consume the attentions of people on the left. Where does culture fit into all of this?

Wallace Shawn

We need emotional depth and sensitivity. Particularly if you’re imagining, as I do in the book, “What if the Left succeeds?” Let’s be frank. Sometimes people with wonderful motivations have disappointed everyone when they came into power, because of a lack of emotional depth and sensitivity and compassion. Just to overcome global warming alone requires brains! To try to guide society, that requires emotional depth and sensitivity.

People need the wisdom, or the imagination, of others. Who do you learn from? You might have a wise and compassionate friend. But very few people, maybe no people, can invent their own menu of possibilities. Don’t great works of art have something to teach you? Maybe Tolstoy has something to teach you. Maybe Debussy. Maybe many others. No one would deny that Noam Chomsky has special intellectual capacities. Beethoven has special capacities, Ibsen had great insight into the psychology of human beings. If we’re imagining that a better world could be created, don’t we need their help?

Jason Farbman

We were talking about the neglect of higher culture. Then there’s the way the Left understands mass culture, which can be brainless or even have terrible political conclusions. But millions of people see it, the entertainment industry makes millions and millions of dollars. Quite a few people draw pessimistic conclusions from this, about what that says about people. As if that’s just sort of a static fact about people, that Hollywood is giving them what they already want. What do you think about the popularity of mass culture?

Wallace Shawn

I grew up on a book called the Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, which was a collection of fairy tales written by nineteenth century writers. These were folk tales that were told and passed on and then transcribed and re-imagined by some rather sophisticated storytellers.

Yes, I have participated in the creation of some very popular, commercial works, quite a few of which contain fairy tale or folk tale elements. But from my point of view, most American storytelling films are quite reduced — less refined, less complicated, and less profound than the fairy tales I grew up on. If people had been exposed to the earlier versions, they would have understood and loved them, but most people have not been exposed to the earlier versions.

A diet of sugar can addict you to sugar. You can become addicted to chicken fingers to the point that you would reject a delicious plate of pasta in favor of chicken fingers, but if you were to overcome the addiction, you would actually enjoy the pasta more than you ever enjoyed the chicken fingers.

People have a great hunger for stories, for imaginative expression, for insight, so if there’s no way they can access Charles Dickens or Verdi or other very popular but slightly complicated artists, they’ll gorge themselves on things that aren’t really worthy of their attention. Do I think that makes people less smart? Yes, I do. And I definitely think that it makes you smarter to read a smart book or listen to a smart piece of music. I totally believe that.

Jason Farbman

It’s important to emphasize how little people have access to art that might provide more emotional depth and sensitivity. The movie industry repeatedly claims it isn’t to blame for what gets produced, because studios are just making films to satisfy people’s demand.

Wallace Shawn

Well, that’s just not true. They do believe that, and there is short-term evidence for that. But this is very crude. Trump says “nobody is interested in seeing my tax forms, and the proof is that I won the election.” People in Hollywood would say, “the public’s favorite thing is to see people’s heads being blown up, and the proof is that my movie about people’s heads being blown up made five hundred million dollars.” That’s just not proof.

Jason Farbman

You’ve had a very successful career. Millions of people can easily recognize your face, your voice, your work. And you’re an open socialist. There are sections of the Left that criticize liberal celebrities who make statements, or who take roles deemed insufficiently radical. Is it fair to expect that celebrities ought to be militant leftists?

Wallace Shawn

A good actor can present a believable imitation of a real person, so by definition a good actor has to have some kind of insight into people — and probably into society too, as a good actor can believably imitate how a person interacts with others. A good actor also has to be very intelligent, as good acting requires the actor to read a line in a script and grasp not only its full meaning but also its many implications and undercurrents — something that most people can’t do. So you’d think every good actor would be left-wing, but that’s not quite true. Many good actors do lean that way, many supported Bernie Sanders, for example, but Jon Voigt is a good actor, and he’s quite conservative. Psychological factors can cause intelligent and insightful people to cling to absurd beliefs.

As for very successful actors or so-called celebrities, well, success can make a person much less likely to see what’s going on in the real world than they were before. If you’re privileged, there’s a lot you need to not see, to deny. So I’m not shocked that all celebrities aren’t militant leftists.

Jason Farbman

Is there such a thing as left culture? Should there be?

Wallace Shawn

It’s like dreaming at night. Dreams don’t tend to be left wing or right wing. They’re something else.

When I write plays, I don’t start with the intellect. I don’t think I could sit here and say, “I am vehemently opposed to capital punishment, and I am going to write a play to show why capital punishment is wrong.” For me, things that are interesting come out of my unconscious.

There’s also a limitation on what I can write, based on what I know. If I wrote about things I don’t know anything about, it would be lame. Could there be leftist art? There might be art that shows the suffering of humanity because the writer has seen that, and cares about that, and it comes out. I would be pretty reluctant to try to write a play about the suffering of workers in the garment industry in China — because I just can’t believe that the product of my ignorance would be a profound play. If you have someone with deep left-wing convictions and an understanding of life, some of that could come out in their work. It might come out, or it might not. In principle, I’m not opposed to someone trying to create a work of art that makes a point. I don’t know how J. B. Priestley went about writing it, but I really liked the play “An Inspector Calls,” for example. But great works of art tend to surprise you, even shock you, and that probably means that the artist also has to be surprised. So that might be why it’s hard to write something great if you already know the point you’re going to make.

Why Wallace Shawn Became a Socialist

Jason Farbman

I’d like to turn to your specific biography, because it would be good to know what incidents informed your art — and your radicalization, particularly as someone from a well-off family.

In Night Thoughts you describe your childhood in some detail, especially the training you received to grow into an adult member of the ruling class.

Wallace Shawn

My parents were not the 1 percent, and I am not the 1 percent. But let’s say the 10 percent. The complexities of my family’s class positions are quite interesting. My father’s father was a peddler and became prosperous. He was really a self-made man who went from having a junk wagon to having a very successful store. He ran away from home when he was fourteen or maybe younger. His wife, my grandmother, was barely literate and only went to school through the third grade. So my father grew up prosperous, but with parents who had been poor.

My mother’s mother grew up in a prosperous family, but then her husband died when she was in her early twenties. She became quite poor. My mother grew up poor, with a mother who had once been prosperous.

Then my father, rising up the ranks at the New Yorker, had a good salary. My parents were doing nicely. My mother always seemed to take it for granted that we were prosperous. As a boy I had a certain awareness of it, a certain feeling of shame about it. I remember a friend, who was poor, came to our home — a quite nice place on Fifth Avenue — and the friend commented on the intricate molding on the ceilings in our apartment. I had never even noticed it! It was an incredibly upsetting moment for me.

Jason Farbman

So politically, were your parents liberals?

Wallace Shawn

Even through the late sixties, my father and mother were both classic FDR-loving Democrats. They had no comprehension of socialism, or anything outside the realm of the American system. They went from thinking the government wouldn’t lie to the public — that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t possibly be lying, because he was the president — to being militantly antiwar.

My father’s opposition to the Vietnam War really split the staff of the New Yorker. Once he was opposed to the war and believed the government was lying, he was open to other types of possibilities regarding what the US government might do. He published things that alienated large portions of the staff, many of whom were veterans of World War II, people like JD Salinger, who, having been soldiers themselves, were not happy at all at the thought of opposing what the American soldiers were doing.

Jason Farbman

Your father ran the New Yorker for decades — to stay on top of a magazine like that, in such a competitive publishing world, for so long, doesn’t seem like a particularly happy model from which to work.

Wallace Shawn

I don’t think my father would’ve said he achieved a great deal of happiness. He wanted to be a writer. But he was trapped in the Depression. My mother got him a job at the New Yorker. He was a socially awkward and sensitive person, who perhaps could never have gotten a job on his own. But my mother had been a successful journalist in Chicago, where they both grew up, and she got him a job at the New Yorker, as a reporter. She got the job for herself, and then said, “Would you mind if my husband helps me?” They said, “Why not?”

She eventually left, but he stayed. He only had one job in his life — from 1933 to 1987. I think, in those later decades, he felt very trapped in his job. He was, perhaps tragically, very identified with the institution of the New Yorker. He wanted to give it a future that was in keeping with what it was like at the time, an impossible aspiration really.

When I showed interest in being a writer myself, he was very into the idea that I not be trapped in a job.

Jason Farbman

A lot of your writing is quite conversational, quintessentially, My Dinner with André. It seems that as your characters work out their thoughts, the audience is invited to do so as well. And over time, your works seem to have become increasingly more political. What was your own process of working out your ideas about the world? How did someone — whose chief responsibility was to make himself happy — become an anticapitalist?

Wallace Shawn

I was not as radical as my own father until I was about forty. I was more of a centrist than he was, in a way. In 1974, my father published a piece that influenced me, by Richard Goodwin, who had worked for President Kennedy. He adapted Marx for the conditions of the United States in the mid-1970s. This was a stretch for my father, who for all his life believed America was basically a good nation, but we just kept making these terrible mistakes. He thought if you voted the right people into office, then everything would be great. Goodwin’s piece was about the structural reasons why there were problems in America.

I missed the sixties. It happened, but I wasn’t there. I began to change just after I’d turned forty, when I went through a crisis. I realized that I, myself, was involved in the way the world was. That my role was not as an observer, as I had thought for the first forty years of my life. I wasn’t in the audience, I was in the drama. And I was one of the beneficiaries of what I already knew to be imperial behavior on the part of my country. Once I realized that I was in the drama, I started reading more about the things that the United States had done. I haven’t read many books in my life, partly because I read very slowly, but I’m proud to say I have read volume one of Capital by Karl Marx, all the way through.

My girlfriend [writer Deborah Eisenberg], had always been a leftist by temperament. She didn’t impose her beliefs on her boyfriend or anyone else. But we did have some discussions, when we first met in the early 1970s, in which she propounded radical ideas that shocked me. One of them is captured in Night Thoughts, where she raises the possibility that civilization might on the whole have been a bad thing. She’d been a student of anthropology and had thought about a lot of things that had never crossed my mind.

Jason Farbman

Your radicalization came during a rather unlikely period. Socialism was not at all popular in the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s, and when the Soviet Union collapsed it was extremely rare to find anyone who thought there could be any alternative to capitalism. At the same time as alternatives to capitalism were taken off the table for a generation, you found socialism.

Wallace Shawn

This was in a period when I had fallen, by chance, into becoming an actor, and had become rather successful as an amusing character actor. I had received some rather large checks, and had gone from being someone with no prospects, an avant garde playwright with no plan for making a living, to suddenly becoming someone who was getting these big checks. I was paid much, much better than I am today.

Someone coming from my background has to struggle not to succeed, in one field or another. Throughout the mid-1980s I was doing quite nicely, so it was brought home to me, and quite vividly, that I was a beneficiary of the world’s status quo. If I went into a restaurant and saw people of my own class, I would feel such hatred for those people I would feel ill. And every time I’d get sick I’d realize that I was just like them. I felt a loathing for myself as someone responsible for the suffering of humanity. I thought, “The United States is the enemy of humanity, and I’m one of the people they’re doing this for.”

Jason Farbman

And then you traveled to Latin America in a volatile period — the late 1980s — to see the Sandanista revolution.

Wallace Shawn

I wanted to go to Nicaragua, to see if there could be a different way of organizing society that would be better. I had always been an incredible physical coward — and I would say I am one again now. But at the time I was in such a state, because I had come to hate myself. We were told, “You can’t just go to Nicaragua, you have to go to El Salvador and Honduras to see what Nicaragua used to be like, and what the differences are.” I was very motivated, and I rather aggressively collected phone numbers of people in Central America whom we could meet. We also went to Guatemala, three times. That all fed into my point of view becoming really different from the point of view of a lot of my friends.

Jason Farbman

Você mencionou o nojo que sentia ao entrar em restaurantes cheios de pessoas privilegiadas. Diante dessa animosidade, é interessante que esse mesmo grupo pareça ser o principal público das suas peças.

Para as primeiras apresentações de "The Fever", por exemplo, você se apresentava nas salas de estar de amigos ricos, atuando diretamente para e diante dos sortudos — o que incutia um sentimento de culpa no seu personagem. Seus filmes tiveram um apelo enorme e amplo, mas suas peças parecem ser direcionadas aos ricos. Por quê?

Wallace Shawn

Eu me apaixonei pelo teatro porque me sinto atraído por ele — tenho esse gene peculiar para o teatro e sempre gostei muito. Houve um período em que ninguém queria produzir minhas peças, mas quando as pessoas começaram a encená-las, percebi que o público era muito hostil. Naquela época, eu não tinha nenhuma análise de classe sobre isso. Em meados dos anos 80, quando terminei "Aunt Dan and Lemon", percebi com mais clareza que o teatro tem um público mais de classe média. Não é como o público do cinema, onde qualquer um pode ir.

Comecei a tentar fazer com que o público se tornasse parte da peça. Em "Aunt Dan and Lemon", apresentei alguns pontos de vista de direita e até fascistas, deixando a cargo do público a forma como reagiriam. Há um personagem vagamente liberal na peça, que é obliterado pelos personagens conservadores e abertamente fascistas.

Meu objetivo era provocar uma reação do público, e dessa forma eles se tornam parte da peça. Em qualquer peça, o público forma sua própria opinião sobre os personagens, mas há um espaço maior para o público em algumas das minhas peças. Se eles não refletirem sobre o que estão vendo e tentarem chegar à sua própria conclusão, não há peça. O drama acontece na mente individual de cada espectador. Esse é o campo de batalha.

Ao escrever minhas peças posteriores, comecei a perceber que estava falando diretamente com a burguesia. É ela que frequenta as peças. Então, vou falar com eles. E eu os conheço, porque sou um deles. Então, "The Fever" é como uma reunião secreta da burguesia, na qual um membro conversa com os outros. Mas não posso partir do pressuposto de que as pessoas que assistem às minhas peças sabem menos do que eu. Se eu me sentisse assim em relação ao meu público, ficaria muito deprimido. Parto do princípio de que eles são como eu e, então, tento apresentar coisas que eu mesmo consideraria inesperadas e imprevistas — coisas em que eu não havia pensado antes. Muitas das minhas peças têm a intenção de perturbar, e se eu não me sinto perturbado enquanto as escrevo, percebo que ainda não estão terminadas.

Colaboradores

Wallace Shawn é um ator, dublador, dramaturgo, ensaísta e comediante americano.

Jason Farbman é editor associado da Jacobin.