Cheers to Wallace Shawn:
"As Glenn Greenwald Can't Return to U.S., I Took My Play to Him"
February 3, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Cheers to playwright and actor Wallace "Wally" Shawn who recently gave a special performance of his play The Designated Mourner to Glenn Greenwald in Brazil. Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In addition to The Designated Mourner, Shawn has written other critically acclaimed plays, including The Fever and Aunt Dan and Lemon, and has appeared in many TV shows and movies over his long career.
Last year, when The Designated Mourner was performed at the Public Theater in New York City, Greenwald did not attend because he feared the U.S. would prosecute him if he returned to the U.S. These fears are not unfounded. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently said that journalists could be considered accomplices of Edward Snowden. And last summer David Gregory of NBC's Meet the Press interviewed Greenwald and said, "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" To which Greenwald replied:
I think it's pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themself a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies. If you want to embrace that theory, it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information, is a criminal. And it's precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States.
On January 31, Wallace Shawn was interviewed on Democracy Now! and said that performing the play for Greenwald "was a gesture of, expression of respect for the fact that he did what we all should be doing. He has risked his neck. He's risked his physical security and freedom." He also said that he chose this particular play to perform for Greenwald because "it happens to be a play that is on the subject of speaking out, in a way..." He then talks about the relevance of what the characters in the play are going through:
So, they haven't really done anything, and yet, as the political space in the country gets smaller and the regime begins to crack down, the people who are on the fringes are threatened, because artistic freedom, artistic freedom of thought, is dangerous freedom of thought, just the way political freedom of thought is. If people are out there thinking on their own, that's dangerous to governments, if they are repressively minded. And so, it becomes dangerous for the son-in-law—me, my character—to live in the house with these rather dangerous people, or people who are mildly dangerous because they're thinking freely.
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