Wallace Shawn’s career must be a mixed blessing.

He’s been a performer nearly half a century and can probably live comfortably off “The Princess Bride” residuals for the rest of his life, but that film overshadows his work as a lauded playwright and raconteur. Unless you’re Corky from “Waiting for Guffman,” you probably aren’t itching for “My Dinner with Andre” action figures.

Bay Area director John Wilkins certainly knows Shawn’s work. His former company, Last Planet
Theatre, used to hold an entire festival based around Shawn’s plays. He has the very theater
history of someone who’d want to stage Shawn’s divisive 1990 solo show “The Fever,” which is running at Clio’s Bookstore through April 18 in an extended run. In fact, Wilkins actually beat Shawn himself to the punch in using this play to respond to 2026 America.

Staging a play in a bookstore may seem like it could be a logistical nightmare, but Shawn’s original performances were all in private living rooms; he only brought it to a proper stage once its
reputation had flourished. Wilkins sets the action in the literally-underground Oakland bookstore
and bar, with the tour beginning in the Poetry section near copies of Homer and Dante. If that
weren’t unconventional enough, each performance is scheduled to begin at 11pm.

The narrative brings us a nameless man (Benoît Monin) in a white sport coat, striped pants, and
red-feathered “shoes.” He enters and flashes a blinding strobe light in his face as he recalls men
being sent to the electric chair. Sans strobe and mask, he tells the first-of-many anecdotes about
his affluent upbringing in an unnamed country. It doesn’t sound happy, but it sounds full: full
plates at every meal, full haul of presents under every Christmas tree. As time goes on, our man
becomes all the more aware of how much he has whilst many of his countrymen — indeed, even
his family’s servants — are stretched beyond their means as they attempt to afford the basics.

Little by little, he goes from the man who believes “It’s a wonderful thing to have money in a
country where people are poor” to someone for whom the idea of redistributing wealth doesn’t
seem that far-fetched. Of course, he knows what happens to enemies of the state who act on such ideas — just look at those guys who wound up in the electric chair.

You know “The Fever” is a fantasy by its depiction of a wealthy scion having an altruistic
epiphany about their fortune. Our man — who may or may not have read “Atlas Shrugged” — is
anonymously gifted Marx’s “Das Kapital” and suddenly has a new purpose in life. It’s a
comforting thought, if not a realistic one, but what is drama if not a playground for
verisimilitude.

Monin is a lively guide through both the aisles of Clio’s (audience members are given wrist
bands upon entry) and our man’s self-realization. He lays bare political fears, sexual proclivities,
and coping mechanisms (at one point, he shares bright-red drinks with the audience) as he finds
himself unable to deny a societal truth. For the most part, it’s an intriguing and surreal journey.

The problem comes from the script crossing the line from “loquacious” to simply “long-winded.”
It makes its point several times ever, but Shawn’s script spirals into redundancy as it nears its end, proverbially beating the audience over the head.

This does Shawn’s own story a disservice, and it’s a bit of a pain if, like me, you arrived in Oakland via public transit. Indeed, the performance I attended began a half-hour late and ran over the advertised 90 minutes. I didn’t get back to my bed in San Francisco until after 3 a.m.

There are several moments in “The Fever” which require the audience to step over corpses to
hear our man’s next rich-person tale. One thinks of traversing through major Bay Area cities on a
daily basis as oligarchs price most of us out of house and home.

The text has lost none of its power as an unconventional call-to-arms. The flaw comes when it knows it’s preaching to the converted, but continues to pile on. This frequently-sold-out production is a surreal tour through selfless enlightenment, but even it’s brief running time runs the risk of testing a viewer’s endurance.

Charles Lewis III claims to be an award-nominated journalist, culture critic, and performing artist born and raised in San Francisco. He alleges to have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, the San Francisco Examiner, and many more. Dodgy evidence of this can be found at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.

‘THE FEVER’

By Wallace Shawn, presented by Cabaret Clio

Through: April 18

Where: Clio’s Books, 353 Grand Ave., Oakland

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes, no intermission

Tickets: $35; eventbrite.com (search for cabaret clio)