The Designated Mourner - Acting Edition

THE STORY: THE DESIGNATED MOURNER tells the story of three people: Howard, a poet, essayist and intellectual who comes from a privileged background but who nonetheless has been at odds for many decades with the right-wing regime that rules his country; Judy, his daughter, a subtle, witty and deep-feeling intellectual, who reveres her father; and Jack, Judy's husband, who at one time also revered Howard but then changed his mind. Judy was drawn to Jack in the first place because he's an amusing person who perhaps offered a refuge from the high standards inexorably imposed by her father, but his disarming light-mindedness turns out to have some unpleasant disadvantages. As the political situation becomes more tense, and the regime becomes more and more likely to crack down even on relatively quiet dissenters like Judy and Howard, the issue of what sort of books people like to read and how they choose to amuse themselves becomes both grimly personal and unexpectedly entangled with questions of survival.Wallace Shawn is the author of 'The Designated Mourner - Acting Edition', published 2002 under ISBN 9780822218487 and ISBN 0822218488.