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.
The setting designed by Riccardo Hernandez starkly situates along the edge of the stage four identical chairs separated by little tables. The actors walk on and take their seats facing the audience. They are nicely dressed in casual clothes and bring along coffee mugs. A row of arched windows behind them frames white shapes occasionally flickering in the darkness. Later, talking to the audience, Dick (Hamilton), indirectly explains the play’s title. Noting his boyhood term for someone’s mortality was their “moth days,” Dick remarks, “I guess I sort of pictured that when people died, they were gently and vaguely and flutteringly escorted into death by a flock of blind moths.”
What We Did Before Our Moth Days gradually reveals the secret lives of its four privileged white American characters: Dick is a successful novelist who unexpectedly drops dead at 45. Dick and Elle (Dizzia) were high school sweethearts whose only child is Tim (Early), who also becomes a writer. Elaine (Davis) is the woman Dick met at a party when they were in their mid-thirties. Their subsequent life-long affair (“The little devil in him liked the little devil in me,” fondly recalls Elaine) lasting over the next decade, which Dick admits to Elle early on, merely deepens the sense of estrangement the married couple already has gradually felt in their bonds. The marriage remains but Dick and Elle lead separate lives outside of home. Their son Tim, whose feelings for his dad seem ambivalent but for his mother obviously are Oedipal to a degree, much later develops a questionable relationship with Elaine.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Similarities in the characters of Elle and Elaine that attract both father and son are among the prickly issues the drama considers, as well as what Tim calls the “innate destructiveness of human beings.” Among several such troubling themes, a fatalistic view of life as expressed by the dissolute Tim is especially bleak, suggesting humans by nature cannot help but blindly succumb to the tempting “games” of war, love, sex or the ceaseless urge to seek “something we want over there.” And everybody dies, of course, including the family dog.
Shining performances brighten the play’s darkness. Their bodies constrained by sitting in chairs, the artists are challenged to be just that much more subtly expressive with their faces, hands and voices while relating their characters’ sides of the story to viewers. The few times when the characters exchange glances with one another resonate with unspoken drama.
Andre Gregory’s direction has inspired poignant work from an exceptional company. The carefree picture of boyish, WASP-y middle age in his shawl-collar cardigan, Josh Hamilton portrays Dick with a winning smile and an easy affability all through his life until, as he later says, “that cloud of blind moths came fluttering toward me and carried me across the finish line.” Depicting Elle, a relatively subdued individual whose feelings widely fluctuate, Maria Dizzia illuminates her countenance in many fleeting shades of happiness or emotional absence or raging, with a resting bitch face formidable to behold. Elaine is not always physically present on the stage – and what’s less, the reclusive character seems underwritten – although a plaintive Hope Davis gives vitality to a soul more shadowy than mysterious, who likes her liquor and is not as cool as she believes. Sensitive viewers may be repulsed by Tim, a quietly creepy figure in an expensive leather jacket who talks about evolution and his different encounters with little girls and prostitutes. A soft-spoken John Early lends the melancholy character an eerie sense of detachment that suggests Tim has been stunted emotionally by Dick’s benign neglect of his family.
Gregory’s staging appears minimal, but it is expertly wrought. While one character speaks, Jennifer Tipton, the great lighting designer, shadows the others within an exquisite, silvery twilight. Credited with sound design and original composition, Bruce Odland contributes soft bits of tender music for guitar, flute and percussion.
A rueful story rendered in some 30 monologues and one conversation late in its third act (and third hour), What We Did Before Our Moth Days presents a gloomy study in extremely first world existential worries – although the characters are not entirely unhappy – somewhat relieved by the intimate, confidential quality of its first-person narration. Excellent acting by a million-dollar ensemble and the subtle niceties of the play’s staging in a 199-seat theater make the current production at Greenwich House a special occasion unlikely to be duplicated elsewhere. Devotees of Shawn’s writing will want to witness his intimate new drama in such rewarding circumstances.
