Actor-writer Wallace Shawn, soon to premiere his new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days at Off-Broadway's Greenwich House Theater, has added a revival of his Obie-winning 1990 solo play The Fever to his schedule, which will play the same venue in rep with the new work.
The Fever will perform twice weekly on Sunday and Monday evenings beginning February 16. As previously announced, What We Did Before Our Moth Days is playing a 12-week run at the theatre beginning February 4 ahead of a March 5 opening, continuing through April 26.
The production is the latest from scandal-rocked producer Scott Rudin and Barry Diller. Rudin has been largely absent from the industry since reports emerged of his abusive behavior to subordinates behind the scenes. Though such reports have been published periodically over his career, Rudin stepped away from his professional life following 2021 articles in The Hollywood Reporter and New York Magazine. Published in the wake of the #MeToo movement, both resulted in renewed calls for Rudin to be barred from the industry. Rudin ultimately announced that he would “step back” from Broadway productions and film projects and resign from The Broadway League, installing Kate Horton as executive producer of his then-developing Broadway revival of The Music Man. That revival would open at the Winter Garden Theatre in 2022 starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. News of What We Did Before Our Moth Days follows Rudin's return to Broadway producing, also with Diller: Little Bear Ridge Road with Laurie Metcalf, which closed earlier than originally scheduled following sluggish ticket sales last year. Rudin and Diller's revival of Death of a Salesman, starring Metcalf and Tony winner Nathan Lane, has already been announced for the spring.
The Fever, which premiered with Off-Broadway's Public in 1990 and won the 1991 Obie Award for Best Play, sees Shawn becoming a nameless narrator in a squalid hotel room in a poor nation rife with political repression. As he recovers in solitude, he is forced to confront his own privilege and complicity in the outside world's atrocities.
"I have always been a person who enjoyed the pleasures of life, including the turkey dinners and hot fudge sundaes that come with being an American," explains Shawn in a statement. "I began writing The Fever when I came to understand that to enable me to live the life that I lived, various other people had been starved and killed. And there’s undeniably a certain anxiety involved in enjoying that particular way of life today when one listens to the nakedly brutal pronouncements of the thugs who currently run our country."
Since the piece's initial premiere, it has been performed at such venues as London's Royal Court Theatre, the Avignon Festival, and Bucharest's ARCUB, in stagings starring such actors as Cate Blanchett, Lili Taylor, and Tobias Menzies. The play got a screen adaptation in 2004 via HBO, with Vanessa Redgrave starring.
Tickets for both The Fever and What We Did Before Our Moth Days are available at MothDays.com.
