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The emotional depth of “The Fever,” a play that looks at one man’s privilege compared to the suffering of many around the world, always challenges actor Bryan Bevell, even though he’s performed it a dozen times.
“It’s taken me years and still I can find myself rather emotional performing it. The tone and the rhythm are so relaxed, but the play is about the horrible injustice and inequity of those born destitute and without any way out, without any alternative,” says Bevell, an Albuquerque native who now lives in Minnesota with his family.
He’s bringing the play Friday, March 8 through March 10 to the Vortex, where he was a regular actor in the 1990s, he says.
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If you go WHAT: “The Fever” WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 8 and Saturday, March 9; 2 p.m. March 10 WHERE: The Vortex Theatre, 2004 1/2 E. Central HOW MUCH: General admission, $18, and $10 for students five minutes before the performance, if seats are available. For tickets call 247-8600 or go to www.vortexabq.org |
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Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, perhaps better known for co-writing and acting in “My Dinner with Andre,” wrote the one-man 90-minute play in 1990 for intimate audiences to highlight the disconnect between middle-class individuals and the poverty and suffering of people in Third World countries.
“It could be Africa, Latin America or Asia, anywhere around the globe,” Bevell says. “The main character, the Traveler, could be a man or a woman.” In fact in 2004, Vanessa Redgrave starred in an HBO production of “The Fever.”
Bevell’s character is very ill in a hotel room and watches political persecution unfold outside his window.
“He’s not very familiar with the basic facts of his life,” Bevell explains. “He has extreme sympathy and good intentions, but he doesn’t really do anything. He’s sincere, but it doesn’t change anything at all.”
In one speech the character begins to understand that his chambermaid’s condition isn’t temporary. The circumstances of her life were determined at birth, while his can change.
“It’s an unflinching appraisal of privilege and what it means to have resources and means in a society where so many people are desperately poor,” he adds.
Bevell first performed the play in 1999 while living in San Diego as part of theater company there: “I spent a year trying to find someone to act it and I would direct it.”
The company was one where fellow actors accepted challenges that frightened them and as a result helped them grow as actors, so he knew he had to do it.
“The play scared me to death. It’s just you and the chair out there on stage,” he says.
He’s performed the play in California and several places around the country. He performed it as a part of political protest rally in Minnesota and subsequently in other theaters.
“The play won’t die for me,” he says.
Although the play is long on insight, it is short on solutions, he adds.
“It’s full of irresolvable questions,” he says. “We hope opening your eyes and raising your awareness is a good thing. Perhaps we lift a little more of our self-delusion.”
