Bryan Bevell
6 Shows Only
returns to San Diego
to perform the show he's made his own:
THE FEVOR
By Wallace Shawn
Feb 6th
at 5 & 9:30pm • Feb 7th at 4 & 7pm
• Feb 8 & 9 at 7:30pm.
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619-688-9210
The House of Yes
and
The Fever Package
Great Discount
"Lodges like a small permanent splinter deep in the
mind... critic's choice"
Anne-Marie Welsh, San Diego Union-Tribune |
"Intellectually
bone-chilling... This is heady, head-spinning stuff.
It makes you evaluate your own values and makes you
wary, even terrified of getting mired, buried,
consumed by the unanswerable questions, lest you,
too, lose your soul."
--
Pat Launer, KPBS Radio |
Playwright Wallace Shawn (Aunt Dan and Lemon, The
Designated Mourner) has crafted a haunting, harrowing
drama in which an unnamed narrator's visit to a beautiful
country is marred by political struggles which force him to
review the presumptions of a "liberal" existence in the face
of harsh, murderous reality.
This is political theater at its finest - unsettling,
probing, often disturbing. It it also lyrical, deeply
moving, and quite beautiful. NY Newsday calls the play
“mesmerizingly theatrical—a profoundly engaging journey
through the awakening of a pampered man's conscience.”
In this production, Bryan Bevell reprises his role as the
unnamed Traveler, which he performed to great acclaim both
in 1999 and 2000. Bevell’s work in The Fever played to
sold-out houses in those earlier runs, and was named
‘critic’s choice’ in numerous publications.
In 1999 The Fever was sited as one
of “The Year’s 10 Best Shows” by San Diego’s largest daily
newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, as well as by online
critic and Orange County Weekly theater writer, Brook
Stowe.
Bryan Bevell (bio below) is a Minneapolis based actor and director. From
1995-2000 he was artistic director of the Fritz Theater in
San Diego. In 1994 he conceived and co-founded The Fritz
Blitz of New Plays, the largest annually held new play
festival on the West Coast. On May 2, 2002 the San Diego
Union-Tribune wrote, “Bevell has an eye and an ear for the
best -- fresh, edgy, relevant works that last. His one-man
contribution made San Diego theater in the 1990s a heck of a
lot more interesting.”
Since 2002, Bevell has lived and worked in the Minneapolis.
He directed Lobby Hero at Jungle
Theater in 2003, after which he directed a number of lower
profile, yet well-received works including, Good
Clown, Bad Clown (CityPages 10 Best Shows of
2004), The Sea Wolf (CityPages 10
Best Shows of 2005), Gangster No. 1, The
Designated Mourner, and Mac Wellman’s Fnu Lnu,
among others.
"Grassroots theater at its finest... Shawn's theater is not
of didacticism, but of dialectic, of disturbing questions
posited to provoke us rather than simple answers to
soothe...a compelling evening."
Brooke Stowe, Theater2k.com
"Outstanding...
critic's pick"
-- Jeff Smith, San Diego Reader
"Devastating."
-- Jennifer de Poyen, San Diego Union-Tribune
"Top 10 Show of 1999"
- -San Diego Union-Tribune
Bryan Bevell
is an actor and director currently living
in Minnesota. He is probably best known locally for his work
at the Fritz Theater, where he served variously as actor,
director, producer, artistic director, associate artist, and
advisor from 1992-2001. Bryan also helped conceive and
create the long running new play festival, The Fritz Blitz
of New Plays. Among his local credits are The Caretaker
(Renaissance Theatre), Glengarry Glen Ross (Compass), The
Fever (Fritz), Fat Men in Skirts (Fritz), The America Play
(Fritz), Sexual Perversity in Chicago (Fritz), A Midsummer
Night's Dream (Fritz), In the Heart of America (Fritz), Sex
Drugs Rock 'n' Roll (Fritz), Gangster No. 1 (Fritz), King
Lear (Fritz), Sincerity Forever (Sledgehammer), Free Will &
Wanton Lust (Sledgehammer), and the world premiers of My
Marriage to Ernest Borgnine (Sledgehammer), and OXYGEN (San
Diego Rep).
review
"the fever"
the
fritz theatre
san diego, ca
19 april 99
reviewed by
brook stowe
Early on in "The Fever",
Wallace Shawn's travelogue through the guilt of privilege,
the narrator launches into a deliciously detailed
recollection of a Christmas gift he received as a child. It
was a large box. And inside that box was a smaller box. And
inside the smaller box, an even smaller one. And so on.
Watching "The Fever" unfold is much like opening boxes
within boxes, which Karin Williams' fresh and imaginative
staging delivers smartly in wrappings alternately plain and
bold.
Seizing upon the
timeliness of the Kosovo incursion, Williams presets her
show with taped excerpts from radio call-in programs and NPR
newscasts of the escalating conflict that segue seamlessly
into Shawn's opening "in a poor country where my language
isn't spoken." The narrator (Bryan Bevell) is hunched over a
toilet in a shabby hotel bathroom, alternately puking and
re-evaluating his bourgeois existence.
His doe-eyed,
dollar-book Marxism is so glibly transparent, your immediate
reaction is to scoff: hold on here. Isn't this the same
Wallace Shawn who rakes in big bucks in a dumb TV show that
shills for American consumerism? Sure it is. An uneasy
relief washes over you. This is just another duplicitous
dilettante assuaging his own guilt at our expense. The
relief begins to dilute the disturbing nature of his
lingering images. Just another white boy singing the blues.
Then Shawn opens another
box.
Now the narrator is back
in New York, returning from a performance of "The Cherry
Orchard", scornfully unmoved by Madame Ranevskaya's plight
("This person would no longer own the estate she'd once
owned...she would have to live in an apartment instead...").
Suddenly, with this connection, the perception changes.
The similarities between
the narrator and Mde. Ranevskaya are unmistakable; both are
class-bound, self-deluding narcissists lost in rosy
recollections of their pasts while remaining stridently
oblivious to the collapse of their present (is Shawn's
narrator most impressed with this wretchedly poor country
because of the purity of its Marxist agenda? No! He's crazy
about the ice cream!). Suddenly, it becomes clear that Shawn
is not really preaching to the choir but rather gleefully
mocking it with a sweetly derisive hymn of his own.
That is, until another
box is opened.
In the end, there is one
box left, and director Williams wisely leaves this one
unopened. For this is the box between performance and
audience. Shawn's theater is not of didacticism, but of
dialectic, of disturbing questions posited to provoke us
rather than simple answers to soothe.
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