Chilling journey grips audience

This could be you. In Wallace Shawn's The Fever, Brennan Brown's, DRA '00, gripping everyman performance implicates his audience as his character spirals into desperate self-incrimination and reproach. Brown immediately establishes himself as someone you probably already know. He leads an average upper-middle class life, appreciates Beethoven and ballet, and tries to appreciate the joy of existence and show compassion for those less fortunate.

Catalyzed by his visit to an unspecified, revolution-torn country, he plunges into an alienated numbness alleviated only by painful purgation through vomiting and delirious self-confession. This rant reaches a startling climax when he finally "puts down the burden of lies" that have shaped his bourgeois life and becomes aware of his responsibility for the crimes he blindly inflicts on the poor to precariously protect his privileged life.

The minimalist production allows Brown's lucid acting to shine—the barrenness of the set mirrors the emptiness of the protagonist's life and clears the stage for the torrent of thoughts and emotions that overwhelm his life and the play itself. His direct confessional style immediately allows the audience to identify with him, making his transformation a painful voyage for the spectators along for the ride. The beginning of the show drags, but as Brown descends into his inferno, his abrupt shifts from frenzied rants to plaintive appeals to restrained attempts at rationality create a gruesomely captivating roller coaster of emotion.

The Fever speaks to the nagging sense of guilt and unfulfillment that plagues modern public consciousness, shattering our apathetic complacency and attacking out sense of entitlement. Though it would be easy to dismiss the script's simplistic and occasionally clichéd reproach of our privileged lifestyle with a distanced, intellectual rebuttal, our desperate attempts at self-justification are precisely the excuses that cease to have meaning when confronted by the bloody realities of the poor. The Cabaret's production offers the rare opportunity to let go of our defensiveness and consider our own odious culpability, if only in the safety of the darkened theater.

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