What We Did Before Our Moth Days, written by Wallace Shawn and directed by André Gregory, is on at the Greenwich House Theater through May 24.
In Greenwich House’s timeworn former children’s theater, a ninety-one-year-old director and eighty-two-year-old playwright stage a sedate play about the ordinariness of death. New York theater stalwarts Maria Dizzia and Josh Hamilton, dour indie darling Hope Davis, and millennial ironist John Early sit in charcoal waiting room chairs against three arched windows to nowhere, fitfully backlit by the flutter of projected moths. Their most athletic blocking over three hours: occasionally lifting mugs of tea and then—watch out—lowering them. Who but Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, the dialectical duo of My Dinner with André (1981), would dare serve up this steaming brew of Sleepytime and manage to make such a riveting night of theater?
What We Did Before Our Moth Days, Shawn’s latest play of sinuous monologues, directed by Gregory, demolishes the fourth wall and replaces it with a wall of four talkaholics…
