‘Evening at the Talk House’ review: A grim theater party indeed

Wallace Shawn is best known as a master Hollywood character actor — you know, that balding, squat, pink man with the querulous voice and the mysterious smile.

To theater people, however, Shawn is also a brilliant political provocateur, one of our major playwrights of conscience. Since the mid-’70s, he has imagined such profound, genuinely upsetting works as “Aunt Dan and Lemon” and “Fever,” which, in his peculiar and charming way, ask how many awful things we will allow to happen to others in order to protect the way we like to live.

“Evening at the Talk House,” which hadn’t quite come together when I saw Scott Elliott’s eclectically cast New York premiere at The New Group, was written several years ago. It had its premiere at London’s National Theatre in 2015. In other words, Shawn created his 100-minute dystopian theater party long before we read all the stories about the sudden national popularity of “1984” and other apocalyptic classics.

The setting is the 10th reunion of a flop play held at the Talk House, a formerly hot backstage club set up to feel like a cozy living room. Matthew Broderick, as Robert, the playwright-turned-TV honcho, begins with a long monologue, written a bit in Shawn’s vocal rhythms. He talks obliquely about a few powerful politicians. Then he introduces the sweet woman who still runs the place (Jill Eikenberry), the former producer (Michael Tucker), the musician-turned-ad-writer (John Epperson), the wardrobe-supervisor-turned-private tailor (Claudia Shear), the theater-star-turned-TV-star (Larry Pine) and the failed aspiring actress, now back as a waitress (Annapurna Sriram).

And in the corner sits a crumbled man in old pajamas, a sport jacket and bruises on his face. This is Dick (Shawn), who never got the part in Robert’s play and who, after a brief success playing a TV buffoon, has become an alcoholic. Hardly a welcome guest, he has been living in a Talk House room since he was, as he puts it, “beaten up by friends.”

Thus we are casually folded into a world where the theater is dead, blackouts are common, authoritarians rule the world and conversation centers, often with gleeful nastiness, on who’s in and who’s out of inane entertainment.

But then someone mentions she supports herself by participating in the “murdering program,” targeting “people who potentially want to harm us.” People everyone knows are poisoned — “painlessly” or the “horrible way.”

The finale is suitably macabre, but a bit anticlimactic. Missing is the way the best Shawn works tighten the knot that connects our comfortable life to our complicity with cruelty. That thrilling awfulness is lost.