Inside the Quintessentially New York Opening Night of What We Did Before Our Moth Days
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 that, while people have many birthdays, they die on only one day. He refers to this as their “moth day,” because, as he says in the play, “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 onstage 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.
The three-hour production is broken up by two intermissions, making it feel much shorter and more like an episodic drama. At the curtain call, as the cast received a standing ovation, Shawn and Gregory made their way to the stage, both beaming.
When the show got out, the rain had resumed and the party moved promptly to The Spaniard, a whiskey bar just down the block. Friends of the theatermakers gathered in two private rooms in the back—one with a distinctly ’70s-style lounge atmosphere—to celebrate the triumph of opening night. Applause resumed when the cast arrived, and a photo shoot took place in the spacious bathroom while guests sipped cocktails and snacked on mini quesadillas and sliders. An affair for all ages, Dizzia’s 11-year-old daughter was also in attendance. “She’s floating around having the time of her life—and chicken skewers!” Dizzia exclaimed.
“I feel so thrilled,” Early told Vogue, “most of all that we had a room full of people who love Wally and love André.” He recalled reading for his part: “I went to André Gregory’s apartment, and it was the most surreal experience of my life. I read the monologues to the two of them, and they were so kind, and they listen in such a deep way that people of my generation don’t. It’s a lost art.”
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Remarkably, the Moth Days cast has been rehearsing for over a year, a process that Early compared to psychoanalysis. “Like true, old-school analysts, they don’t really say much, you know? You start talking, and before you know it, you’re totally connected to your unconscious mind. But that only happens if there’s another person in the room who’s listening in that deep way.”
Escola, a fellow theater darling, also expressed their awe of Shawn’s writing and of the four actors who brought the work to life, saying simply, “I love New York!”
Early’s castmate Dizzia, seated at a table with her mother, was similarly effusive about Shawn: “Wally has led such an introspective life, and his play is filled with all of those decades of his introspection and of his observations about people and of his studying of human behavior. It feels like it’s the culmination of all of his work as a writer. Just every tiny observation and every understanding of subtlety and contradiction in people is all packed into this.”
Shawn arrived at the after-party fashionably late, clad in his raincoat and 3M N95 mask. “I’m speechless,” he told Vogue as he lowered his mask. “This is such a high point in my life. I’m such a lucky guy. You can tell the world that!”
Photo: Drew Elhamalawy1/10Cole Escola, Kate Berlant, and Naomi McPherson
Photo: Drew Elhamalawy2/10Cole Escola
