The LRB podcast is sponsored by Art and Ideas, a podcast series featuring J. Paul Getty Trust President Jim Cuno in conversation with artists, writers, curators and scholars.

In the latest episode, Ankar Moolstein, author of The Pen and the Brush, How Passion for Art Shaped 19th century French novels, discusses the symbiotic relationship between authors

and artists in 19th century France. Search Getty Art and Ideas on Apple Podcasts, Google Play,

or other podcast sources. I'm very pleased and honored to be sitting here with Wallace Sean.

Sean is one of our great actors in American film and television

famous for roles. He's played in Manhattan and the Princess Bride, as well as in two great

films with Andre Gregory, my dinner with Andre and Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street, both of them

directed by Louis Malle. Sean is also one of our finest and most challenging playwrights.

In The Fever, the Designated Mourner, and in his most recent play, evening at the talkhouse,

Sean has explored the sordid underbelly of Western privilege, the brutality and misery that make our lives possible,

and that we do anything not to think about unless we're being entertained.

Sean has a new book, a terse free-form essay that he calls night thoughts, a title that might just

be applied to any of his writings, which inhabit a nocturnal zone between reality and the world

of dreams or nightmares. His work has never seemed more urgent, more distressingly prophetic, because it's always been

acutely attuned to how easily civilization slides into barbarism and to the thin line between

entertainment and cruelty, two topics we can't avoid these days.

Wally, it's great to have you here.

It's great to be here. And I'm sure you

didn't mean to slight our third film, a master builder directed by the great Jonathan Demi.

Not at all. Ibsen's master builder. Yes. You've been, you've been chided at times for taking too bleak or critical a view of America, but now we're seeing the rule of law under siege in D.C. and the designated mourner is being revived, partly in response to Trump's election.

So in a way, you're having the last laugh, except it's laughter in the dark.

I'm wondering how that feels.

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