THE DESIGNATED MOURNER

Here's one of the few recent examples of the avant-garde as audio theater. If you've seen the critically acclaimed film MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ, you have some idea of what to expect: talk and more talk, musings that characters aim right at the audience, rather than each other--like a recording of the stream-of-consciousness interludes from O'Neill's STRANGE INTERLUDE. Playwright/actor Wallace Shawn staged and starred in this talk-fest-with-music in a small, funky New York performance space in cooperation with director AndrZ Gregory. They remounted it as a radio play for "The Next Big Thing" program on New York's WNYC. Even though the program's host starts the three-hour meditation with an overlong explanation of the play's virtues and meaning, and even though Shawn, Gregory, and company do their indefinable thing very well, it takes work and concentration and several listenings to get anything out of it, during which one must endure Shawn's grating, lisping voice. Whether or not the dedication pays off depends very much upon the listener's sympathy with Manhattanite intellectualism and penchant for the off-beat. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 02]