On Thursday evening, the rain paused for a moment in New York as theatergoers of all ages crowded into the Greenwich House Theater for the opening-night performance of What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the latest work from playwright, actor, and all-around New York icon Wallace Shawn. Enjoying the rare dry moment in the day, people stood outside the theater laughing and chatting. A young woman in overalls nursed a cigarette while a couple, a few feet away, kissed passionately. “I hear it’s Greek tragedy meets Americana,” one gentleman told his friend.
Directed by Shawn’s longtime friend André Gregory—the pair appeared together in Louis Malle’s 1981 film My Dinner With Andre—Moth Days is a dark comedy that explores the lives and deaths of four characters: a husband and wife, their son, and the husband’s mistress. The title comes from one character’s rumination on the fact that while people have many birthdays, they die on one day only. He refers to this as their “moth day,” because “I sort of pictured that when people died, they were sort of gently and vaguely and flutteringly escorted into death by a flock of blind moths.”
The actors—Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, John Early, and Josh Hamilton—sit on stage in chairs facing the audience and speak mostly in long monologues, recounting their lives, relationships, and innermost thoughts. The result is funny, devastating, and distressingly relatable.
Even in their shallower thoughts, the characters speak in a sometimes cryptic poetry, communicating a sort of universal existential dread and philosophizing on relationships gone sour. “We were a bit like two sheep grazing on the same hill—we were together, more or less, but we had no obligations to each other,” one character muses, and we know exactly what he means.
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Before the play began, Shawn, dressed in a simple black blazer, could be seen wandering the audience and greeting friends, many of whom were octogenarians and nonagenarians. Behind him, a projection of moths flitting about illuminated the arched windows. There was also a younger contingent present—friends of Early, mostly, including Cole Escola, Kate Berlant, Naomi McPherson, and Jack Haven.