Wallace Shawn is immediately recognizable from his many film and TV roles, including Manhattan, The Princess Bride, My Dinner with Andre, Clueless, the voice of Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story, The Cosby Show, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Shawn is also, according to Neil LaBute, “the most underrated playwright in America.”

Shawn’s plays are challenging in both form and content. The sexually explicit A Thought in Three Parts was described by David Hare as “the only successful piece of pornography in the modern theatre.” Shawn’s work ranges from political provocations to fable to the seemingly unstageable: an early work, The Hotel Play, requires “an apparently infinite” cast, and The Fever was performed by Shawn himself in the homes of friends. His new play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, depicts, over three and a half hours, a world that is heading toward catastrophe as scientific interference triggers a fight back from nature. It also vividly portrays an explicit love affair between a man and a cat.

During a season devoted to his work at the Royal Court Theatre in London, I was invited to interview Shawn onstage about his life, his plays, and his views on politics and on his new book of collected essays. The first part of the conversation took place on the main stage at the Royal Court Theatre in front of an audience, the second part weeks later, by phone, after Shawn had returned to New York.

—Duncan Macmillan

 I. A PROFESSIONALLY MADE OBJECT

THE BELIEVER: Do you feel more highly regarded in the U.K. than in the U.S.?

WALLACE SHAWN: Well, obviously we should strive not to care that much! It’s part of the genetic code, I suppose, that we want to be respected, liked, considered appealing. You could say, in the States, theater is not an important form. It’s a smaller part of the spectrum, I would say. It would be, I don’t know, like raising orchids—a hobby that certain people are very, very interested in, but not many people care about it. So there are more people who are interested in theater here in England, relatively, relative to the population. And all the plays they do at the Royal Court are new, so most of the people who come here are actually pleased to see something new that they can’t predict. In the States, theater is more a place to perhaps escape into a cozy, somewhat more predictable universe, and many people who go to the theater are nostalgic people who perhaps wish they were back in their...