At the beginning of the new drama being presented at Greenwich House Theater, its four performers walk onstage and sit in chairs facing us. They’re smiling and holding cups of tea, as if about to engage in a quiet conversation about the gentlest of topics.
But this is a play by Wallace Shawn, so What We Did Before Our Moth Days is anything but.
Representing the latest effort in the decades-long collaboration between Shawn and director Andre Gregory (including the classic film My Dinner With Andre), this work is very much in keeping with the playwright’s aesthetic. Running more than three hours and composed almost entirely of monologues, it’s dense and necessarily wordy, demanding intense concentration. And while it doesn’t feature the political themes that have often been prevalent in Shawn’s works, it’s typically deeply thoughtful and often provocative in its incisive portrait of the destructive nature of human relationships.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★☆ review here.]
As we eventually learn through the Rashomon-style elliptical storytelling, the characters are Dick (Josh Hamilton), his schoolteacher wife Elle (Maria Dizzia), the couple’s grown son Tim (comedian/actor John Early), and Dick’s mistress Elaine (Hope Davis), also a writer. It soon becomes apparent that more than one of the characters is dead, and that the title refers to the events in their lives before the day they passed, or their “moth day.”
The play begins with Tim recounting the story of how he learned of his father’s untimely death at age 45 via a phone call from his mother in the middle of his encounter with a non-English speaking prostitute he had brought home with him. Tim’s dissolute nature is made clear when he casually tells us, “I wasn’t able to offer her any sort of pre-emptive apology or explanation concerning the possible physiological or psychological issues that might cause me to behave unexpectedly in regard to some of the classically celebrated acts in the canon of normal sexual behavior.” (Yes, it’s Shawn managing to be intellectual and perverse at the same time.) Later, Tim tells us how he often thought about what it would be like to kiss his mother or touch her breasts, although he assures us that his fantasies never progressed any further.
The play largely concentrates on Dick’s gradual estrangement from his wife as his career as a novelist takes off. He begins leaving her alone with their young son as he repeatedly goes out at night, frequenting parties and nightclubs and hanging out with another, more well-known writer. He eventually begins an affair with Elaine, the writer of an unsuccessful murder mystery novel who supports herself as a freelance copy-editor. Meanwhile, the lonely Elle begins a flirtation with a prosperous businessman at a local restaurant she frequents by herself.
While the events being related are frequently dramatic, the style of presentation is not. The characters tell their stories in casual, chatty fashion, as dispassionate as you might imagine someone relating the events of their life before they died. Only Elle becomes emotional at times as she talks about her husband’s betrayal that caused her to fall out of love with him. She continues to live with him because she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. “To use the familiar baking analogy, I was baked,” she tells us. “I couldn’t take the flour out of the cake…it was just too late.”
The play, performed in three acts, begins to drag toward the end, ironically losing the most steam with the sole scene in which two of its characters engage in a lengthy dialogue. That it holds our interest for so long is a testament to Shawn’s ability to make conversational writing compelling and the superb performances by the actors. Only Early seems out of place, his stylized, louche demeanor not quite meshing with the naturalistic turns by the others.
Gregory’s staging is minimalistic but effective, the actors so understated in their delivery that we find ourselves leaning forward so as to not miss any nuance. Jennifer Tipton’s piercing lighting and Bruce Odland’s subtle sound design and music make invaluable contributions, while Bill Morrison’s projections feature ethereal images of moths fluttering in the background.
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.
