There is no justification for inequality. That is a thought that playwright and actor Wallace Shawn says could poison your life. It has poisoned the lives of some of the characters in Shawn’s plays including The Fever, which recently received a staged reading in New York at Revolution Books. In this interview Shawn discusses his work, the perverse pleasure of power, and the subject of a recent speech he gave at the Academy of Arts and Letters: The Unobtrusives

Shawn touches on everything from his own childhood, traveling to India at the age of 21, putting pressure on Barack Obama, and why the Democratic Party is part of the imperial system.