Okay, let me get a couple things out of the way first.

This is an interview I conducted with Wallace Sean, the actor and playwright at a sunny apartment here in New York City on February 25, 2026.

After the interview was over, I realized I referenced a number of works Wallace Sean has written that not all of our listeners may be familiar with.

If I recall right, we talk about the designated mourner, evening at the talk house, and the fever.

These are all plays by Wallace Sean.

The designated mourner is about a horny, self-involved coward of meager talents who finds himself absurdly,

as the last man standing among a class

of intellectuals who have either been absorbed or shot by a fascist regime.

Evening at the talkhouse is a play about esthetes, which is a word I don't know how to pronounce,

but it's about esthetes. You know what esthetes are. It's about estates reuniting and will be of

particular interest

to those who work for Palantir or these large AI companies that are being used to target strikes.

There's audio versions of both of these available and there's a film of the designated mourner,

which John Early sent me on a Russian streaming platform that plays frightening ads every half hour.

The fever is Wally's most famous work and also quite personal seeming.

It's a long monologue originally conceived as to be performed in living rooms.

It's about a man coming to terms with life, not just his life, but all lives of all people who's ever known that have ever existed in the world. And famously, it contains a very concise description of commodity fetishism. I'd read some of it to you, but that would be, you would find it, I would do it poorly. I'm not going to do it. I thought that would be like a good thing to do in the intro.

I tried to do it for two seconds. I was like, I can't do things like this. But it's great.

He reads it fantastically. You should read it to yourself, or you can actually go see it,

and you can, in fact, see Wallace Sean perform it on Sunday and Monday nights at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan, unless you're listening to this episode in like three years, in which case the run of the show is probably

over.

Most other nights, the same theater, the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan, will be showing

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