Children: A Play in Two Acts Book

I have been familiar with Wallace Shawn primarily as an actor, but impressed with my memories of My Dinner with Andre, I decided to read one of his plays. The Designated Mourner is a strange set of monologues mostly in a world which, at first, seems very much like our own, particularly in Manhattan.

Suddenly, we are made aware of violence at the edges of society, of people being killed on the street and in restaurants. There are changes in government. Two of the characters are imprisoned for five years for an unspecified offense. In one of his monologues, Jack says:It was one of those weeks when loose ends, apparently, were being tied up. You know, once the people who do cause trouble are gone, then it's time to get the ones who might cause trouble, who who might once have been able to cause trouble twenty years ago....Eventually, Jack realizes he is the only person left who could read John Donne.I heard John Donne crying into a handkerchief as he fell through the floorplummeting fast through the earth on his way to Hell. His name, once said by so many to be "immortal" would not be remembered, it turned out. The rememberers were gone, except for me, and I was forgetting: forgetting his name, forgetting him, and forgetting all the ones who remembered him.As I read this play, I felt myself in the middle of one of those unforgettable Luis Bunuel films such as The Exterminating Angel or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in which strange inexplicable things were happening.

I must read some more of Shawn's work. Also, I had better read some John Donne before it's too late.