The Designated Mourner
Actually, it might seem to be, you know, a little absurd to lock somebody up for five years and then have someone come to his house and shoot him—all basically because of a couple of essays he'd written several decades before—but you have to understand that no one person plans these things: person A decides the first thing, person B decides the second, you know, I mean, that's just how it works.
The Designated Mourner (1996) by Wallace Shawn
Jack, like his wife Judy and her father Howard, lives in a circle of artists and academics, in a time when political violence is forcing many to take sides: the government is using the threat of a revolt by the underclass to set up a brutal police state. Among the educated and privileged, some have spoken out and now live in fear; others have tried to keep above the fray. But for Jack, who has come to resent Judy and Howard and sees nothing worth preserving in their world, the political is entirely personal. While the others cling to their humanity, Jack narrates his descent into nihilism, ending in an ambiguous peace. There is no visible action: as in Beckett's Play, we hear three people frozen in time, telling the story of how they came to this state; unlike Play, one has survived in the end.
Notes
The Designated Mourner brings together threads from Shawn's previous works which might previously have seemed to have little in common. It shares some of the dreamlike qualities of The Fever, its use of monologue, and its sense of gradually dawning horror as injustice and violence become inescapable; its characters and dialogue are in the semi-realistic mode of Aunt Dan and Lemon, and it shares that play's concern with moral and intellectual choice and personal loyalty; and Jack's breakdown is a tour of the extreme emotional states depicted in Marie and Bruce and A Thought in Three Parts.
Critics have tended to assume that the play is set in an imaginary country, or a near-future fascist America, as if civil war and the murder of intellectuals were science-fictional ideas. But the twentieth century is full of events more or less like these: Germany, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and so on... any of which could be Shawn's setting with very few changes, though his characters sound like they'd be at home in New York literary circles; he adds just enough unfamiliar elements (e.g., televised executions via colorful tubes in the mouth) to keep the audience in the same state of frightening newness that the characters are experiencing. There's an element of "it could happen here and these are the warning signs," but it can also be read as "these things happen—and when they do, this is how our natures may respond."
Fascist repression, as illustrated in the play, has three sides: violence against the powerless; violence against anyone who might side with the powerless; and the encouragement of general fear among the uninvolved, to convince them that the repression is their only protection from something worse. For Jack—like Aunt Dan, and like the paranoid voice in The Fever—the threat is the downtrodden majority of the human race, who would kill those of us who have anything, if we let down our guard. And the government doesn't have to tell Jack or Dan that; they infer it themselves from the fact of their privileged existence, and then choose to abandon morality for, as they see it, self-preservation—but passively, letting the winning side do the dirty work for them. From this point of view, it's not just that we live in a dangerous world, but that thinking about the state of the world is dangerous—you might get involved that way. It's fitting that the diary Jack keeps, during his attempt to destroy his mind, is called "Experiments in Privacy" (which may also be a sad joke on Gandhi's autobiography, An Experiment with Truth).
More than a few critics, though, took a different lesson: apparently taking Jack's paranoia at face value, they assumed the unwashed masses had won and become murderous oppressors. (W.D. King seems to think so too, though his writing on this play is unusually unclear.) This would tend to make the narrators either tragic victims of an ignorant mob, or annoying elitists who had it coming; either way, it would mean Jack's obsession with taking sides between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" was accurate. But if you pay attention to the play's words, it clearly describes an internal coup and purge within a fascist state, not any kind of popular revolution; and Jack is not only full of shit, but full of shit in a way that's central to the moral action of the play: he's taken the things he happens to hate or distrust about himself and his surroundings, and made them the targets of an ideology. He doesn't exactly join the fascists—he's too passive and, despite himself, too moral. Instead, he sets up a parallel coup and purge inside his own head, trying to stamp out his consciousness the same way the government is stamping out the bearers of memory and independent thought. The ending suggests that he's found an escape that's both greater and less than he intended.