The Designated Mourner
Both Howard and Judy are dead when The Designated Mourner begins–though they’re onstage alongside their “designated mourner,” Jack, offering their views on how, but not why, their “very special little world” came to an end. For Howard, a onetime writer of radical tracts who turned to the less controversial (because less comprehensible) form of poetry in order to survive, it was a matter of gradual diminishments in the quality of life–the closing of an espresso bar in the park, the chopping down of a grove of trees–until one day a brick came through the window. For Judy, it was the emergence of new faces in positions of power, people “who dressed in new colors–those chalky colors, yellow and pink and various greens–and lived in new neighborhoods, and even ate in new restaurants with new styles of cooking.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The mismatch between Jack and Judy, not to mention Jack and Howard, is perfectly conveyed in the three actors’ fine performances. David Shapiro as the self-centered Jack (a role played by Mike Nichols in the play’s world premiere last year at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain) is straightforward and outgoing, but with a dry, slightly sardonic edge that recalls Shawn’s own film performances. Martha Lavey’s Judy is dreamy and rarefied–she’s like a doe gazing into the headlights of an oncoming car when she describes the inevitability of her class’s demise. And in the too small role of Howard, Nicholas Rudall perfectly suggests a very real type of aging intellectual–the sort of patronizing patriarch who responds “so sensitively to the most obscure verses and also to the cries of the miserable and the downtrodden, sometimes virtually at the same instant, without ever leaving his breakfast table,” as Jack puts it. In withering lines like that, Shawn turns a cold, penetrating light on the dying out of a “high” culture whose remaining proponents are too weak, too shortsighted, and too self-indulgent to react to the danger they’re in, as well as on the relentless rise of a mass culture that knows little of the values of the past–and cares even less.
