Shawn of the Dead

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 addressing the audience in mellow mockumentarian tongues. The characters are less people than self-narrating memories. Hamilton plays dissolute author Dick, who lived a wholesome youth; married his wife, Elle (Dizzia), young; had a wayward son, Tim (Early); plunged into a protracted affair with freelance editor Elaine (Davis); and died. Over three seated acts, all who orbit the phallic father reveal the emotional detritus of his nonstory. The fickle histrionics of lust and love, which make us feel individual while furnishing our lives with comforting clichés, are viewed from the vantage of their humbling little ends.

Wallace is late New Yorker editor William Shawn’s son, his work a barbed-wire hug to the city’s chattering classes—perhaps more tenderly than ever in this distorted echo of his father’s own decades-long extramarital relationship with journalist Lillian Ross. Moth Days’ genteel gabfest, with its bookwormy costumes and liminal event-hall scenography (both by Riccardo Hernández), brings to mind a New Yorker Festival of the departed. (Shawn is delightfully nonliteral about this: A theatrical device that can transcend the world’s greatest boundary is far more interesting than a ghost.)

The formal sequel to Shawn’s dystopian male-ego autopsies, The Designated Mourner (1996) and Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2009), Moth Days likewise recounts life and death in an unnamed city via plaited soliloquy. Whether having a Criterion-starred meal at Cafés Des Artistes or a modest fruit salad (his usual, per the Times) at Chelsea Square Restaurant, winning over Zohran skeptics in the East Village or Blair Waldorf on the Upper East Side, Shawn seems part and parcel of New York: a Manhattan “homunculus,” a plainclothes Vanya on 42nd Street. Yet like Mourner and Grasses—as well as the monodrama The Fever (1990), performed by Shawn and running in repertory with Moth Days—his new play is evacuated of local signposts. Shawn genericizes toponyms and cultural signifiers: Characters refer to “our city” or “the big city” when speaking of their mortal stomping grounds. Restaurants are named “Emanuel” (“a funny, dark place…where the good-looking boy in the kitchen really knew how to cook”), “Arnold” (“an expensive and sensual hangout on a sordid, violent street”), and “Mike’s Next Door” (“very, very quiet”).

In Shawn’s uncharacteristically apolitical Moth Days, imposed universalism can at times beget obviousness: It’s no revelation that married eyes wander or that death is the only certainty, and denuding those observations leads them close to truism. But this also feels like a ruse. Shawn unleashes abstraction and lets it wander down darkly idiosyncratic interior paths. Were Moth Days more anxious to court the zeitgeist, Early’s failson Tim, for instance, might wield the parlance of the manosphere rather than veer, as he does, into a dark-sided Tree of Life monologue about the molecular origins of existence. In this world, whether you’re a philandering lit bro or a fledgling sex offender, a self-possessed paramour or an altruist led by young love into the abyss, you’re probably just as perversely philosophical as Wallace Shawn. Evenings at Shawn’s talk houses routinely expose lofty self-reflection as a smoke screen for corrosive selfishness.

In Moth Days, Gregory and Shawn continue their soft insurrection against the norms of theatrical space—namely, that it is filled with blocking and dialogue. With Gregory all but refusing spatial activation and isolating performers in parallel play, the actors’ voices and faces, singular instruments of emotion and communication, start to feel, as Tim sermonizes in his abiogenetic zoom-out, “not random, arbitrary” but “inevitable”: Early’s gentle timbre, which chillingly belies the play’s darkest personality; Davis’s bracing frankness; Hamilton’s prophylactic charm. Maria Dizzia’s unforgettable performance as the collateral damage of the affair and a Madonna waxing Medea ruptures the teatime limbo. Her resting smize becomes a primal scream as she leaps from conversational recollection into anguish as acute as any I’ve seen onstage. Gazing at us from their chairs, the extemporaneous dead remind their live audience that we’re also just a bunch of unwieldy pasts in the presentable present costumes of bodies.

Early on, Dick explains that as an eight-year-old he coined the term “moth day” to refer to the date of one’s passing; he pictured people “escorted into death by a flock of blind moths.” Dying, he adds, “seemed to [him] to be obviously one of the most common things to happen in the world—not to mention one of the most obviously boring things as well.” I was electrified by the play, but for any who begin to feel heavy lidded from its unyielding stillness, consider it practice.