BY KAREN BOSSICK

Pete Simpson has performed more than 5,000 shows as a Blue Man. He has appeared on Broadway, off-Broadway, at the National Theatre in London and in dozens of film and television productions. He won an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. None of that, he says, quite prepared him for the role he will undertake this week in Ketchum.

"It's a 14,000-word, 26-page text," Simpson said of "The Fever." which he and fellow Obie winner Paul Lazar will perform in alternating roles Tuesday and Wednesday, June 16 and 17, at The Argyros. "I haven't had a lot of time to prepare for it. It's daunting."

Simpson has been walking to the subway with the script in hand, riding the subway with the script in hand, walking from his dressing room to the bathroom with the script in hand — all while running another show at the Atlantic Theater in New York.

When the words wouldn't stick, Lazar suggested a tool from the experimental theater world that he and Simpson inhabit: in-ear technology, where the text is fed to the performer through an earpiece in real time.

"I can't describe the madness of that experience," Simpson said. "You're literally speaking and simultaneously you've got words coming in fresh every second. You're slightly ahead of the text as it comes, then you speak what you heard, then you're aware of the next words coming. It's quite a multitasking event."

He paused. "It's almost like a Navy SEAL operation."

“The Fever,” presented by Jon Kane's Sawtooth Productions in collaboration with The Argyros, brings Shawn's Obie Award-winning one-person play to Ketchum as a workshop before it transfers to The Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn in 2028.

Lazar performs Tuesday, directed by Simpson. Simpson performs Wednesday, directed by Lazar. The unique collaboration follows a model borrowed from the legendary Broadway run where Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly swapped roles nightly in Sam Shepard's "True West."

"I bought it hook, line and sinker," Simpson said of the role-swapping approach. "The artistic challenge of that — can you direct it and then jump in it and be in it?"

"The Fever" follows a privileged narrator who falls violently ill in an unnamed, impoverished country while a political execution takes place beneath his hotel window. What begins as physical sickness becomes a fever of conscience as the narrator spirals into a searing examination of wealth, guilt and complicity in global inequality.

Shawn, an actor known for his roles as Dr. John Sturgis in “Young Sheldon” and for his roles in "The Princess Bride," "Clueless" and as the voice of Rex in the "Toy Story" franchise, first performed the play himself in 1990 — not in a theater but in the living rooms of friends in New York City.

He would not allow it to be staged in a conventional theater space, said Kane. People gathered the way they had in the 1800s before radio and television, when someone would play a violin or tell a story and that was how art was shared.

The play won the Obie Award for Best Play in 1991 and was adapted into an HBO film starring Vanessa Redgrave in 2004. It has since been performed in theaters for more than 30 years and is currently running in New York City.

"Wally wrote it around the time of the excesses and greed of Wall Street culture, the burgeoning of the billionaire class, rampant consumerism," Simpson said. "He was responding to that in 1990. Turns out it's prescient and speaks to our time right now."

Simpson described a passage in which the narrator discusses the simple pleasure of opening gifts. Through Shawn's philosophical lens, the sequence becomes something else entirely.

"When you buy something, are you getting something that landed from the sky with a price tag? Or are you getting something made by people who may or may not have suffered getting it to you? There's always a philosophical meaning behind it."

Other passages, he warned, are more difficult. "He talks about privilege and taking stock of what we take for granted — the have-nots, the ones who we leverage all our privileges off of. His descriptions are very graphic and difficult to hear."

The direction, Simpson said, is deliberately minimal. No ornate set. A chair. A conversation with the audience.

"Let's sit on a chair and talk to people," he said. "Direction becomes about smaller things — which direction your chair faces. Paul says turn one quarter to evoke a different scene. Small, micro, minutiae details. Where do you keep a beat, what the truth or idea of each paragraph is, each page."

Lazar, a founding member of Big Dance Theater alongside Annie-B Parson, brings his own formidable credentials to the project. He won an Obie Award for directing "Barbarians" at La MaMa in 2026 and has directed and performed internationally for more than three decades. His work spans from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the Meltdown Festival in London, where he directed a version of Young Jean Lee's "We're Gonna Die" featuring David Byrne. His film credits include "Snowpiercer," "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia."

Kane, whose Sawtooth Productions has built a track record of bringing world-class theater to the Wood River Valley, called “The Fever” the most timely play he has ever produced.

"It speaks to what's going on today — so powerful," Kane said. "It's about the privileged class abusing their privilege and power, delivered in a one-man monologue. And when you  change the actor, it changes the play."

Kane does not expect large numbers of people to attend both performances but said the comparison will be extraordinary. A special ticket price is available for those who want to see both.

"We're going to see two world-class performers at the highest level in our little town in Idaho," Kane said. "This is the kind of powerful theater where the audience needs to be engaged and thinking. People will be talking about it."

Simpson, who performed at the Reinheimer Ranch in Sam Hunter's "A Case for the Existence of God" and in last fall's workshop of Sarah DeLappe's "Thin Mints," said the collaboration with Kane and The Argyros keeps drawing him back.

"When I tell folks I'm going back to Sun Valley, they're like — what? Where?" he said. "John has brought together some really amazing people. He's got fantastic, world-class talent. It's a little mini miracle."

IF YOU GO:

Paul Lazar performs a workshop production of "The Fever" at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 16, directed by Pete Simpson. Pete Simpson performs on Wednesday, June 17, his performance directed by Lazar. Both performances are at The Argyros.

Tickets are available at https://www.theargyros.org/events-calendar.