Wallace Shawn.

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 and have no effect. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld say the same things after the facts that they said before the facts, so that's kind of crazy.

Some people say Bush is a religious fanatic who believes he is inspired by God. I don't know if there is any truth in that at all. But I don't think Cheney claims to be inspired by God, and yet even when his theories seem to be disproved by facts, he just keeps repeating them. It is astounding that America does work in the same way that an open dictatorship works, in that a handful of people really seem to be able to dominate an entire country.

I just translated The Threepenny Opera of Brecht, and when the characters of the murderer and the thief said, "How can poor muggers like us compete in criminality with the big corporations?" the people in the hundred-dollar seats sometimes broke into wild applause. Even though they were prosperous, they were so angry at Bush because he was really trying to help people who are even more prosperous, the top 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent.

Q: When did you start getting interested in writing?

Shawn: I grew up around writers. I thought people basically were writers unless for some strange reason they weren't. Then I had a period where I turned against the idea. From sixteen to twenty-two, I was anti-writing. But then I flipped back.

It's a strange activity, that need to put words together and look at them and read them. Is that the right way? Is that what I meant? I suppose it's some kind of quirk, like any other. Not to be maudlin, but I have an autistic sister who is very interested in her own right arm. She is just fascinated by it. Writing is something like that; it's just a quirk. That's how I like to spend my time, and I've done that from an early age.

Q: You've been involved with theater from an early age, too?

Shawn: I was in a play at school when I was five. Maybe I was eight. I thought, this is fantastic. This is much better than everything else that is going on: the lights, the mysteriousness of it, the vastness of the stage. I imagine they are still doing this play--I was a shepherd worshipping a young Jesus. It was all quite magical. The setting was actually daytime but it was night, stars, costumes. From the beginning, that seemed very attractive.

And then, when I was nine, I did a play in school, and people thought I was funny. That was gratifying. The next year, I did quite a different play and people thought I was rather serious, and that was gratifying. So, yes, I was into it from very early on. I saw the potential of it all.

Q: How has theater changed over the decades you've been involved in it?

Shawn: The early '70s was a very, very exciting time in the theater in New York. There were these avant-garde companies, one of which Andre Gregory ran. I thought that what was happening in the room would have a planetary impact. Companies thought that what they were doing might change the world, really. Today, these words sound like the ravings of a lunatic. Such a phrase would not have been used by anybody. But nobody in those rooms believed that they were simply providing diversion or killing time for people who had put in a hard day's work and wanted a little distraction.

Obviously, today people have a realistic view of theater. People are bored in the evening and they want some kind of diversion before they go to bed. They want to be amused. There's television, gambling, and there's getting drunk. Theater is really the safest of all the forms, except for maybe bingo.

But audiences in general are not seeking to be transformed now. I'm not insisting on being nostalgic. In many ways, I was very ill at ease in those days, didn't care for it at all. But it has to be said, the people did come to the play to be transformed. They wanted to see something that would totally astonish them, and they were prepared to commit. They were prepared to go more than halfway themselves to meet the performance that was coming at them. It was not an attitude of, "Oh, what can you do to entertain me? I'm bored and miserable. See what you can do."

Q: What's it like to be in such different artistic worlds? You write plays that are very much about the inner life and yet you also do voices for Disney.

Shawn: It's disturbingly easy to go into different selves. Maybe I have no self. I suppose it is an exaggeration of the ordinary person's life because we all to some extent have different selves. The dentist who is pulling a tooth is slightly different from the same dentist who is having sex with his wife. Of course, the actor is professionally flipping back and forth between different selves, which is why I think people are fascinated by actors.

Q: What's the favorite role you've played?

Shawn: That's a hard question. I was quite fond of being the Grand Nagus leader of the Ferengis on Star Trek. That was quite fabulous. And I loved being Mr. Hall, the teacher in Clueless. I never enjoyed any experience of acting more than being in Vanya on 42nd Street, although I always hated my particular role. I couldn't stand it. But my struggle against it added a certain benefit for the film.

Q: You were writing The Fever in the late 1980s, yet everything seems so current now, these issues of torture and citizen culpability. What inspired you to write The Fever?

Shawn: At first I didn't know what I was writing. I was just scribbling things in a notebook. I was going through a lot of changes. I was doing a lot of reading. I suppose it was the most rapid period of change inside of me that I had experienced really, maybe almost ever. And some of it had earlier roots because I had written another play called Aunt Dan and Lemon, which had definite political themes to it.

Deborah Eisenberg and I made several trips to Central America [in the 1980s]. I was already writing a lot of this stuff that eventually ended up in The Fever before I went there. But it was quite influential to go there and, particularly, to experience coming home, which was awful.

When we went to El Salvador, we met people who had been tortured by the government, which was backed by the Americans. At that time, the Americans didn't openly admit to torturing people themselves. That was just a wild rumor that you would hear, that a guy called Bob walked into the room briefly when torture was going on.

You'd come home and you'd be too excited. You'd be more excited than a liberal is really supposed to be. Because a liberal might be against injustice, but, you know, you shouldn't be hysterical about it. You should calmly oppose injustice if you are a liberal.

I couldn't express all these thoughts at a dinner party. So there was a sense of yes, I have to declare what I am, how I am feeling. And I have to explain it to my friends, to the people who are like me, who grew up like me, and dress like me, and look like me.

I began to hate my own kind. When I would walk into a perfectly agreeable bourgeois restaurant where a hundred people exactly like myself were innocently having dinner, I would feel an unbelievable sense of horror and rage.

Q: What do you say to Americans who don't necessarily feel personally responsible for government-sanctioned torture, such as the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib?

Shawn: Well, that is just a naivete on their part, because they haven't thought about it enough. In other words, if they don't think they are responsible, that's factually inaccurate. You might say, "Oh, he's being silly because each individual is not responsible for the entirety of what happened at Abu Ghraib." But you could do more to try to prevent that. A citizen of Indonesia is just not responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib. There's nothing they could do about it really. Citizens of the United States could do much more.

If you go to a foreign country, and somebody looks at you frankly and says, "Your country is going around terrorizing the world," and then you say, "Well, I'm against Bush myself. I didn't vote for him." They look at you blankly. That's not enough. They know that's not enough. They know that you are benefiting every day, you are paying taxes, your money is actually paying for these things, so come on, that's not good enough.

That's exactly how we would feel, let's say, in the old Hitler days. If you had met a German who was living there and he's prospering, and he's not in opposition, and you say to him, "But look, I've heard about the things that are being done there. Jews are being executed. Your country is a criminal country." If that German just said, "Yes, it's awful, I know, I voted against Hitler, but now what can I do?" Probably, you'd look at him with some skepticism, even though a German in Hitler's Germany had to risk torture and execution for even the slightest resistance. So you have to ask yourself: Would I have had the guts to do that? And an American can do quite a bit without even suffering the slightest punishment.

Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive.