Wallace Shawn’s WHAT WE DID BEFORE OUR MOTH DAYS Opens Off-Broadway

The critics are weighing in on Wallace Shawn’s new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, directed by André Gregor, running now at the Greenwich House Theater (27 Barrow St). The production stars Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, John Early, and Josh Hamilton. Read the reviews.

This play celebrates the legendary, lifelong collaboration between Wallace Shawn and André Gregory that began with Mr. Shawn’s play Our Late Night, directed by Mr. Gregory at The Public Theatre in 1975 – a production that buoyed the experimental theater movement of the era.  Among their renowned film collaborations are 1981’s My Dinner with Andre (co-written by and starring the two men); and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), a filmed adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya which they workshopped for years.  In 2000, Mr. Gregory directed the New York production of Mr. Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, produced by Mr. Rudin.  It was named one of the greatest American plays of the past 25 years in 2018 by The New York Times.

What We Did Before Our Moth Days is set in an urban world of intelligent and somewhat gentle middle-class people – a father, mother, son, and the long-time mistress of the father, who tell the intimate story of their lives. Mr. Shawn, a student of morality whose plays have brought us frank truths about politics and sexuality, takes on the subject of love – suffocating and freeing – and the kaleidoscopic journeys we make through remorse, sorrow, resentment, and joy. 

The design team for What We Did Before Our Moth Days includes scenic and costume design by Riccardo Hernández, lighting design by Jennifer Tipton, sound design and original music by Bruce Odland, and projection design by Bill Morrison.

Helen Shaw, The New York Times: *CRITIC’S PICK* That’s not just a morbid nature speaking. Shawn’s play, a set of interlinked monologues, is written for and from the bardo. Gregory’s production is monkishly simple: Four actors sit in chairs, facing a dimly lit audience, occasionally sipping from their mugs, telling us the stories of their lives and deaths. Gregory keeps them relaxed, but, as three hours sail by, they tell us so much — is this what you think about, when, say, your friends bury you in a ritual grave on Halloween night?

Sara Holdren, Vulture: These dissections and alienations produce the kind of rush you get in looking down from the top of a very tall building after you’ve forgotten for a while that you’re not on solid ground: They can be exhilarating and nauseating all at once. It’s a spiritual dizziness that My Dinner With André provokes in mostly mild, frequently very funny ways. By contrast, Gregory and Shawn’s new project, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, uses similar techniques to compose something still full of humor but much darker.

Charles Isherwood, The Wall Street Journal: Unlike Mr. Shawn’s previous plays such as “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” “The Designated Mourner” or “The Fever” (which Mr. Shawn is performing on Sunday and Monday nights when “Moth Days” is not staged), “Moth Days” has scant sociological, political or philosophical dimensions. The closest approach it makes to evoking more universal truths probably comes in a grim monologue from Tim reflecting on fate, and humanity’s evolution: “The creature that we are wasn’t made by anyone, and if you were to look at it closely as if it were something designed . . . you’d have to say, ‘Oh no, this is terrible, this is an appalling, dreadful design,’ because the creature that we are is so full of characteristics that only a totally demented designer, or a demonically evil designer, would have dreamed of including in it.”

Loren Noveck, Exeunt: I don’t know that the play ever really explains how these people came to be the people they are; Shawn isn’t all that interested in the causal chains of human relationships. He’s interested in secrets, the secrets we keep from others and for ourselves. And he’s interested in the moral compromises and choices we all make to live in a society: what we did before our moth days, after all, is our whole lives. What We Did Before Our Moth Days is, in a weird way, a kinder, gentler Wallace Shawn: there’s no searing indictment of society a la The Fever or subtle Nazi sympathies like Aunt Dan and Lemon or rounding up of intellectuals like The Designated Mourner. But even in that gentleness, there are constant flashes and flares of the darkness at the heart of people; of the ways our own self-interest blinds us to the needs and the humanity of others. In that way, it’s maximal Shawn.

Kyle Turner, New York Theatre Guide: In the swift, no-nonsense, and riveting What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the unraveling of Dick and Elle’s family unfolds across direct addresses from Dick, Elle, their son Tim (John Early), and Dick’s mistress Elaine (Hope Davis). Playwright and theatre stalwart Wallace Shawn illustrates a family, a New York social scene, and a modest web of relationships and competing desires — sexual, romantic, professional — that are at once casually straightforward and sprawlingly novelistic. Complex and sometimes ugly feelings are rendered with precision and wit. Performances, uniformly excellent, vacillate between the slightly paranoid awareness of being observed — as if giving a talking-head interview for a documentary — and the grimy closeness of a conversation at a bar after a few glasses of white zinfandel.

Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: Wallace Shawn’s best known collaboration with director André Gregory is the 1981 Louis Malle film My Dinner With André, in which the two denizens of the downtown arts scenes engage in a rambling philosophical discussion over dinner at the now-defunct Café des Artistes. Gregory, 91, is now directing the 82-year-old Shawn’s latest play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, a three-act domestic drama that’s as wordy, erudite, and esoteric as its title.

Michael Sommers, New York Stage Review: Wallace Shawn offers a sorrowful story of estrangement and infidelity in his latest work, What We Did Before Our Moth Days. Closer to a spoken novella than a conventional play in its format, the drama is structured as more than two dozen interlocking monologues performed by four actors, who almost entirely speak directly to the audience rather than to each other. Hope Davis, Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia and John Early are the fine artists who sensitively relate Shawn’s woeful modern-day tale under the direction of Andre Gregory in the world premiere opening on Thursday at Greenwich House Theater.

Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: What We Did Before Our Moth Days would probably benefit from some cutting of its overlong running time. And it’s hard to imagine it having the same effectiveness if performed by lesser actors or presented in a less intimate theater. The play certainly doesn’t have the thematic heft of such Shawn classics as The Designated Mourner or Aunt Dan and Lemon. But even minor Shawn is of major interest.