About this Event
The response has been overwhelming, every show sold out in advance, so we are extending our run of The Fever, an opening salvo from the cultural front that Clio's is opening against thought cliches, received ideas, bromides, banalities, platitudes, and shibboleths.
Read about it here and here.
This is an exclusive, late-night, soul-drenching, and fully immersive production of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, a corrosive dismantling of one man’s attempt to live a pure and ethical life. The production flows through Clio’s after dark, creating a hallucinatory, fragmented world where random violence and thorny argument confront the dream of the good life. It’s a twisted, painful marriage of humanist yearning and nihilistic glee. Get a ticket. Get a drink. Settle in and buckle up: This could be the last party before the final revolution.
Starring Benoit Monin. Directed by John Wilkins. Prepare to be astounded.
John Wilkins was the artistic director of Last Planet Theatre for ten years, producing and directing plays that few theater companies would touch: Howard Barker’s Ursula, Fear of the Estuary, Anthony Neilson’s The Censor, Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Farmyard, Howard Brenton’s Sore Throats, Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, etc. The Company won the Bay Guardian’s Goldie Award in 2008.
Benoît Monin is a stage actor and improviser in the San Francisco Bay Area who has worked with Shotgun Players, Oakland Theater Project, We Players, Coastal Rep, Stanford Repertory Theater, and many others. Benoît is a member of Oakland Theater Project and La Compagnie Carmina and an associate member of La Lengua Teatro en Espa˜nol. He performs improvised theater with RagTag Improv and Chatterbox. Monin was nominated in 2018 for Outstanding Performance in a Featured Role (TBA Awards) and in 2019 for Best Featured Actor in a Play – Local (Broadway World SF Awards).
Over the past forty years, Wallace Shawn has redefined the nature of what a play is and can be. Starting with his Obie-Award winning Our Late Night, the scorching marriage play Marie and Bruce, and the elliptically pornographic A Thought in Three Parts, he pushed to the breaking point audience comfort levels—or more accurately, discomfort levels. His great middle period (The Fever, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and The Designated Mourner) took a political turn that displeased those on the right, center, and left. The reactions at times approached political hysteria. He continues to upset, dismay, and reinvent notions of what a play is (Grasses of a Thousand Colors, Evening at the Talk House). To say he is a visionary is to undervalue the scope of his accomplishments.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Clio’s Books, 353 Grand Avenue, Oakland, United States
USD 35.00
