Why Wallace Shawn Stepped in to Play ‘the Other Woman’

Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll find out who stepped in as an understudy when two cast members of an Off Broadway play by Wallace Shawn called in sick. We’ll also look at why New York does not test for a potentially dangerous red meat allergy that begins with a tick bite, even though Suffolk County is a hot spot for it.

Two members of the cast of “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” a play that has been running Off Broadway for almost a month, tested positive for Covid. What to do?

Bring in someone who knows the play — Wallace Shawn, who wrote it.

For the other role, Shawn’s longtime companion, Deborah Eisenberg, stepped in. “Her contract as an understudy started today,” Shawn told the audience at the Greenwich House Theater on Wednesday. He wasn’t being funny, he told me on Thursday: She really was scheduled to start on April 1 as the understudy for the two women’s parts in the four-person cast.

Oh, and Shawn played Elaine, the other woman in the play, which is the story of a son, his parents and that other woman.

There are monologues in the script, but on Wednesday there was one more than usual — Shawn ad-libbed it before the performance began, explaining why understudies would be filling in and saying that anyone in the audience who wanted to leave could do so.

“If you just wanted the celebrity factor of being in the room with him,” Laura Collins-Hughes, a New York Times critic who attended the performance, “you could have gotten that from his speech alone and walked out into the lobby and gotten your refund” or swapped a ticket for another performance.

Did anyone actually leave? “I didn’t see anyone,” Laura said.

Scripts in hand

What followed was a staged reading, sort of. Shawn and Eisenberg had their scripts in hand. The other two performers, John Early and Josh Hamilton, did not. Hamilton plays Dick, who has a long-term affair with Elaine. Early plays Dick’s son, Tim.

Some critics have pointed to apparent autobiographical parallels in “What We Did Before Our Moth Days”: Shawn’s father, William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker, had a decades-long affair with the writer Lillian Ross that only became public knowledge when she published a memoir after Shawn’s death — but before his wife’s.

“That’s the voyeur factor of the whole play,” Laura said. But Shawn “really did give a performance,” she said. “I think he is not capable of just reading the script He obviously knows his own comic rhythm.”

Shawn told me that he did not see the echoes of his life in the script. “Some people write very autobiographically, which I don’t,” he said. “The real Mr. Shawn was an agonizing, shy, very, very delicate, self-doubting person.” Dick, he said, “is a devotee of a particular nightspot in New York that I think my father would have found too loud. I don’t think he would have been comfortable there.” Dick also enjoyed parties, “and my father couldn’t cope with a party.”

On Wednesday, he said, Maria Dizzia — who plays Elle, the character married to Dick — woke up “not feeling 100 percent” and tested positive for Covid, Shawn said. “So then everybody in the company tested,” he said, “and Deborah and I tested, and the stage managers tested.” Hope Davis, who plays Elaine, also tested positive.

‘Of course I love to act’

Shawn said he was “eager to step in.”

“We could have tried to persuade a skilled actress to read that part,” he said, “but they would be coming in absolutely cold, whereas I have been at all the rehearsals” except one. “And as far as being the wrong sex is concerned, you know, audiences in the theater are using their imaginations in a way that is not necessary if you’re watching a television program or a film.” Also, he said, “I believe that in Greek theater, it was all men playing the part of women, and in Shakespeare’s theater, it was men playing the part of women.”

“And,” he added, “of course I love to act.”

Early said it would have been different if Shawn and Eisenberg “were just two understudies.” As it was, he said, “I felt like I couldn’t control my smile, looking at him doing this role” in a scene he and Shawn play together.

“He was obviously aware of the audience being tickled by him playing the mistress,” Early said. “It was generous to let the audience laugh at the mere fact of Wallace Shawn stepping into that role.” But, he added, “once they got their giggles out, they really gave in to his performance.”

Weather

Today will start out cloudy, then gradually become mostly sunny, with temperatures near 69. Expect a partly cloudy night with a low around 58.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

Suspended (Good Friday).

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New York, an alpha-gal hot spot, does not keep tabs on cases

More than 10 states require laboratories or doctors to notify health authorities about positive tests for a marker of a red meat allergy that begins with a tick bite.

New York is not one of them, despite evidence that Long Island is a hot spot for the condition, known as alpha-gal syndrome. The state has done little to study the rising incidence of alpha-gal. The State Health Department says it does not have data on the number of cases in New York.

Sharon Forsyth, the executive director of the Alpha-gal Alliance Action Fund, who has pushed for reporting requirements in other states, said it was “completely outrageous” that the Health Department was not keeping tabs on alpha-gal, considering the syndrome’s presence on Long Island. “If Arkansas can track cases with nowhere near the resources,” she said, “I think New York should be able to track cases.”

New York City does, even though the lone star tick — which transmits alpha-gal — isn’t prevalent in the city. Officials said that 280 suspected cases of alpha-gal had been reported to the city’s health department since 2024, a year after the city’s Board of Health added alpha-gal to its list of reportable diseases.

The State Health Department did not explain why it had not added alpha-gal syndrome to its list. A spokeswoman, Marissa Crary, said that the department was considering steps that would help estimate how many New Yorkers have the syndrome.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Suffolk County, which covers the eastern two-thirds of Long Island, appeared to have the most cases of any county in the United States. Based on a study of blood tests from a commercial laboratory, the C.D.C. estimated that between 3,800 and 18,000 people in Suffolk County had alpha-gal from 2010 to 2022. That works out to as much as 1.2 percent of the population.

The blood test for alpha-gal checks for antibodies. Not everyone who tests positive for alpha-gal antibodies will have an adverse reaction to red meat — in fact, experts say, most of them may not actually have alpha-gal syndrome. But data on positive antibody tests can indicate where hot spots are developing.

Crary, the Health Department spokeswoman, said that people should take precautions to avoid tick bites by wearing long pants in wooded areas and performing frequent tick checks while outdoors.

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