Is Wallace Shawn the Only Avant-Garde Artist Who Gets Stopped in Times Square?

After lunch in a cold December, Wallace Shawn walked across town and, despite his ordinary black parka and wool cap, attracted a ripple of excited energy: giggling fans stopped him in line, stared in open adoration and shouted recognitions like his famous exclamation, “Inconceivable!” He is most commonly recognized for screen roles — Vizzini in The Princess Bride, an unlikely Lothario in Woody Allen’s Manhattan and the co‑star of My Dinner With André — yet he considers himself primarily a playwright.

Shawn has earned what he calls a “bourgeois lifestyle” by playing a particular on‑screen persona: less than Greek in figure, superseded by intelligence and originality that the camera captures at close range. “It’s unbelievably strange!” he says of living with those public associations.

Onstage, his work often reads like profane fairy tales that reveal characters’ shameful instincts and secret longings.

United States, New York City

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