Wallace Shawn.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: Interview

Few American playwrights touch upon the personal responsibility people bear for their government's actions. Wallace Shawn has tackled this issue and other weighty ones for three decades. But Shawn may be better known for his comic performances as an actor. He was the squeaky-voiced villain Vizzini in The Princess Bride, the neurotic dinosaur in Toy Story, the lovelorn teacher in Clueless, and Diane Keaton's ex-husband in Woody Allen's Manhattan.

He co-wrote the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre with Broadway director Andre Gregory. Shawn debuted on the stage in Gregory's production of Endgame in the early 1970s. The two have collaborated for years. "Whenever these two dreamy theatricals emerge from the cocoon of their process, it's good news for the American theater," wrote critic John Lahr.

Gregory directed Shawn's 1997 play, The Designated Mourner. It dramatized a crackdown by a new authoritarian regime, and the concomitant cultural shift to escapism. "Now is when we should do it," Shawn says. "It's very apropos to the Bush days."

This year, Shawn's own performance of his one-man play The Fever was released as an audio CD by the Shout! Factory label. The play's character realizes his government is committing atrocities abroad in order to maintain its privileges and standing in the world. The character wrestles with knowing that, as a citizen, he benefits from such injustice.

Shawn has been marching and speaking out against the Iraq War from the get-go. In 2004, he published a one-off anti-war magazine called Final Edition. "It was very successful," he says, noting that now most Americans are against the Iraq War. "Maybe that's because of my great powers of persuasion," he adds with a grin.

I met Wally on a brisk October afternoon in the West Village. He lives in the neighborhood with his longtime partner, the short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg. Shawn was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the son of journalist Cecille Lyon Shawn and William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker. "Because of the way I was brought up, I still find it hard to believe that people in charge are really not rational," Wally says.

He was charming and funny during our interview. But neither his pleasant manner nor his cherubic face could hide his fierce intellect and moral outrage.

Q: What do you think of the leaders of the Bush Administration?

Wallace Shawn: I can't pretend to understand them. Facts come at them...