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The Rogue Theatre loves theatrical meat. Founders Cynthia Meier and Joseph McGrath launched the new company in October with the challenging "The Balcony."

Now it opens the new year with another play designed to wake you up and make you think: Wallace Shawn's "The Fever." It opens Friday and hops around to various locations for its two-week run.

"It's a beautiful piece of writing," said Meier, who is directing McGrath in the one-man show.

"It's a fever dream, so it's more lyrical in its structure than it is a plot-driven story."

It is the story of a man who goes to a poor country in the midst of a revolution. He's in his hotel room when he's hit by a fever. His dreams, intensified by that fever, are a look at the simple questions in life.

You know, how we justify our existence when others live in such severe poverty — poverty that is often a direct result of our wealth.

"The play has really good questions for all of us to ask," said Meier. "How we live our life and what's important to us."

This is a simple production — a chair and the actor — which allows for it to be easily transported.

"We've all had situations where we were listening to a story well-told, and it didn't need a lot of flashing lights or a big moon rising overhead," she said.

When Shawn, an actor as well as a playwright, first performed this, he was sitting in a chair in a friend's living room. That first audience persuaded him to take it to a wider one, and in 1991 it opened at New York's Public Theater.

And while some loved it, some critics pooh-poohed it as the workings of liberal guilt.

Liberal guilt or no, said Meier, it still poses important questions, such as how culpable are we for the devastating poverty and hardships others around the world suffer.

While Shawn likely had Central America in mind when he first wrote this piece, Meier said she thought of Iraq when she read it, and found it relevant to that country.

And to this country, too.

"I was thinking of all the devastation of Katrina, and what it uncovered about the poor people living in our country," she said. "It's a timely piece for that, too."