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(continued from "The Walking Cure")
Nearly two years later Mr. Shinn's ascetic selfscrutiny has resulted in about 80 minutes of stage time. "On the Mountain" is about a mother not a particularly good one and her child, and is based, loosely, on Henry James's "Aspern Papers," in which a man uses unscrupulous means to obtain a poet's lost letters. In this case the search is for a lost song by the mother's former husband, a deceased Seattle rock star.
Mr. Shinn was a college freshman when Kurt Cobain died, and the play is a testament to that lingering shock. But it is also a sympathetic rebuke to today's youth, who, it implies, lack heroes substantial enough to grieve for. The play, opening in previews last week and scheduled to run through March 13, is directed by Jo Bonney, who also directed Neil Labute's "Fat Pig."
Mr. Shinn, who's now all of 29, doesn't look as if he gets out much. He is scruffy and thin, clad in old boots and jeans, and terribly serious. He confesses that he writes plays to make friends, and while it's not perhaps the most efficient way to do so, rehearsal does bring a lonely playwright into energetic human company.
Stepping out of the snow and into Playwrights Horizons, he found a scene stockphotoattractive young actors, winter boots piled in the corner as cozy as a family den, with Mr. Shinn as an oddly young father. Might he in fact be happy? "I'm not having financial problems at the moment," he said. "I love my analysis, I like teaching, my plays are getting produced, I'm writing, I'm productive, so I am very happy these days."
He wasn't smiling.
© 2005 The New York Times.
Published on Sunday, February 6, 2005
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