cover image The Designated Mourner

The Designated Mourner

Wallace Shawn. Farrar Straus Giroux, $19 (172pp) ISBN 978-0-374-13822-6

Wallace Shawn (A Modest Proposal), known to some as that guy in Clueless, has written a new play called The Designated Mourner. With only three characters and a number of intimate monologues, the play stands up very well as a text. The narrator, Jack, who has married into an elite literary coterie, survives an uprising of the underprivileged that has extinguished his highbrow, literary community, and he finds that he is the only remaining witness.