‘The Designated Mourner’ finds perfect medium — a podcast

Lawyers’ Forum

By Rebecca L. Ford

Rebecca L. Ford is a partner at Scharf Banks Marmor. She is a former Executive Vice President of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio.

Posted July 23, 2021 12:06 PM

From the beginning, “The Designated Mourner” by Wallace Shawn should have been a podcast — except when it was written, in 1996, podcasts hadn’t been invented.The intimacy of the ideas in this urgently relevant parable about the perils of inaction and deliberate blindness requires intense listening. Shawn challenges audiences to stay afloat on the river of his words. Now Gideon Media has produced this prescient, disquieting, and rambling work in its rightful format.Although a three-hander, the play is a monologue …

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