Back in January, in a basement in the East Village — the venue, usefully, is called the East Village Basement — the actor-playwright Wallace Shawn and the director André Gregory had dinner. They talked about art and humanity and Gregory’s theatrical and spiritual experiments, some of which approached Dionysiac proportions. Their conversation was familiar to many of us eavesdropping on their corner banquette: As the two moved from soup to dessert, they said to each other just what they’d said in 1981, when Louis Malle recorded their discussion in his film “My Dinner With André.”
They did look different, though. We were watching an (excellent) theatrical adaptation of a film adaptation of a putatively real conversation. Jonathan Fielding and Robert Kropf of the Harbor Stage Company from Wellfleet, Mass., had staged Shawn and Gregory’s screenplay, casting themselves as rather wry versions of the old friends, allowing us to keep a wary eye on that extraordinary 45-year-old chat.
For example: Did Gregory really undergo a ceremonial burial as part of a resurrection ritual? Did his friends really lower him, naked and shivering, into a grave one Halloween night? I saw the film decades ago; I assumed that everything said in it was exactly true. But listening to Fielding and Kropf, playing Shawn and Gregory with such graceful remove, I finally glimpsed the dialogue’s complex texture: comedy and exaggeration, autobiography and artifice.
Now, in the similarly discursive “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” at the Greenwich House Theater, the real Shawn and the real Gregory are working together again. It could be the last time. Their collaborations have stretched over five decades — more theatrical and cinematic landmarks like “Vanya on 42nd Street,” “The Designated Mourner,” “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” and on and on — but Gregory is now 91. Every conversation ends.
That’s not just a morbid nature speaking. Shawn’s play, a set of interlinked monologues, is written for and from the bardo. Gregory’s production is monkishly simple: Four actors sit in chairs, facing a dimly lit audience, occasionally sipping from their mugs, telling us the stories of their lives and deaths. Gregory keeps them relaxed, but, as three hours sail by, they tell us so much — is this what you think about, when, say, your friends bury you in a ritual grave on Halloween night?
For the most part, their memories revolve around a writer, Dick (Josh Hamilton), whose marriage to Elle (Maria Dizzia) and long-term affair with Elaine (Hope Davis), affects his sly and unsettling son, Tim (John Early). A “moth day” is his dad Dick’s term for the day you die. “I guess 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,” Dick says, before accounting for his own.
The first person we hear from is Tim. Happily, Early’s gifts as a chaotic comic make him a magnetic storyteller, capable of saying crazy things as if they’re reasonable. He confesses to all kinds of passions (an adolescent girl) and dispassions (his father’s sudden death) in a chummy, nattering tone.
“And I have to say that my mother was a very attractive woman, and I did think sometimes about what it would be like to kiss her on the lips,” he murmurs, before assuring us that everything he’s saying is normal for the “human animal,” and anyway, given his ontological understanding of the Big Bang, all action is preordained.
Tim’s boneless, casual perversity introduces a characteristic strand of Wallace’s nightmare-erotic thinking, even if nothing in “Moth” is as psychedelic as “Grasses of a Thousand Colors,” in which a man describes bouts of sex with a cat. Tim’s accounts of sexual dislocation do, though, keep the more conventional peccadilloes of his parents humming with vicarious weirdness. There’s a club that Dick likes, for instance, which he takes Elaine to. He keeps hinting that it’s a den of vice, but he never says why. Luckily Tim has so accustomed us to imagining naughty things, we fill in the details for ourselves.
Dick doesn’t pontificate about the Big Bang, although he too seems borne along by events: He betrays his wife for a decade, but what could he do? Forces moved him. Hamilton, with a sharky little smile, lets us laugh at Dick’s self-absorption, only for Dizzia’s magnificently detailed Elle, brittle and moving and beautiful, to shock us back to empathy. “I became so nervous that I couldn’t read,” she says, weeping, and we remember that Dick and Elaine and Elle and really everyone in this odd, hermetic world, has seduced one another with books. Not to read means not to live.
Shawn has often written in rambling, reflexive monologue — he is performing one of his finest, “The Fever,” from 1991, on Sundays and Mondays at this same theater through May 10 — but in “Moth Days” his shaggy-dog style turns fully Beckettian. (Beckett’s “Play,” recently revived at the Irish Rep, looked just like this: A dead, middle-aged love triangle, in urns rather than in chairs, speaking into a crepuscular limbo.)
Where Beckett could be icily cruel to his characters, though, Shawn seems almost kind to this awkward family’s unhappiness. It sounds nuts, but he can be quite warm in this purgatory, even to slithery Tim, even to narcissistic Elaine, even to callous Dick. Despite all the hurt, they do all find ways to love, or at least tend to, one another.
Perhaps that’s because there is an autobiographical parallel here. Shawn’s father, the great New Yorker editor William Shawn, had a longstanding quasi-bigamous affair of his own, which his children only discovered long after everyone else. Just as Dick does, the older Shawn openly carried on in two households, and, just as Elle does, his mother endured.
Shawn has written so many self-lacerating pieces (no one epaters the liberal bourgeoisie like Shawn) that I kept trying to apply the lessons of “My Dinner With André” to the middle-class confessions in “Moth.” I tried to question the seemingly autobiographical and to listen for dry humor when language seems most sincere. But despite my efforts, I have, probably foolishly, started to believe Shawn is demonstrating the process of his own forgiveness.
At the very least, there’s a purgative effect here, in which venting the energies from a sordid guilt offers catharsis. (Isn’t that the literal job of purgatory?) It’s a wisdom Shawn shares with, of all people, his father. In André Gregory’s book “This Is Not My Memoir,” written with Todd London, Gregory writes about walking with the elder Shawn on the day the United States left South Vietnam. Shawn warned Gregory that what seemed like an ending to suffering was probably a beginning.
“Well, you know what happens in families when you sweep all the garbage under the carpet?” Shawn asked. “That’s what we are going to do, and it will return to sting us.” What a funny thing for William Shawn to have said, to the man who, more than a half-century later, would collaborate with his son on lifting the carpet he laid down. Interesting, too, that the project would be, ultimately, so gentle. Things may return, but they do not always sting.
What We Did Before Our Moth Days Through May 10 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; mothdays.com. Running time: 3 hours.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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