'What We Did Before Our Moth Days' Off-Broadway review — Wallace Shawn delivers captivating and bleakly funny storytelling

Read our review of What We Did Before Our Moth Days off Broadway, the latest collaboration between playwright Wallace Shawn and director André Gregory.

Summary

• What We Did Before Our Moth Days follows the unraveling of an NYC family in the wake of an affair and other troubles
• The show is told through monologues by four actors and the storytelling is enhanced by watching the other characters react on stage to what's being said
• Playwright Wallace Shawn and director André Gregory's intimate yet sprawling story excellently shows how small acts of indifference or cruelty can have major ripple effects on one's relationships

When describing her philandering novelist husband Dick’s (Josh Hamilton) latent anger, Elle (Maria Dizzia) compares it to the “featherweight brush of a razor”: light but potentially fatal. And although Dick eventually admits that his aspiration to be a “good person” is no longer viable due to his actions, the fleeting smirk that races across his face as he makes excuses for himself glistens like a blade. His actions are not exactly charged with bloodlust, but they display the kind of casual cruelty born of self-interest and indifference to others.

In the swift, no-nonsense, and riveting What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the unraveling of Dick and Elle’s family unfolds across direct addresses from Dick, Elle, their son Tim (John Early), and Dick’s mistress Elaine (Hope Davis). Playwright and theatre stalwart Wallace Shawn illustrates a family, a New York social scene, and a modest web of relationships and competing desires — sexual, romantic, professional — that are at once casually straightforward and sprawlingly novelistic. Complex and sometimes ugly feelings are rendered with precision and wit. Performances, uniformly excellent, vacillate between the slightly paranoid awareness of being observed — as if giving a talking-head interview for a documentary — and the grimy closeness of a conversation at a bar after a few glasses of white zinfandel.

Shawn and longtime collaborator André Gregory, who directs, have an incisive understanding of the horrible fickleness of love and obligation. Through the quartet’s storytelling, they place unruly desire, and its tendency to turn on a dime, on needles like a butterfly or moth on display. We hear of the exact moments love turns to disdain or indifference, how pursuing one’s own pleasures creates a domino effect of neglect and resentment, and the methodical yet accidental way we train the people in our lives how to treat us.

As the story of Dick, Elle, Tim, and Elaine’s relationship unfurls through their respective points of view, What We Did Before Our Moth Days begins to resemble a Rubik's cube of psychosexual hangups, each face detailing events as they were and creating echoes of how they could have been. What would have happened if Dick hadn’t gone to those writer parties, if Elaine hadn’t said yes to a weekend in the country with Dick, if Elle had never called Dick on his clumsy alibis, if Tim never had the abrupt encounter with Elaine that sets the play in motion?

Simmering beneath the show's lush descriptions of time, place, and feeling is an unease in the face of trying to make peace with human nature’s competing impulses of creation and destruction. Even as the actors speak one at a time (save for two scenes in the third act), everyone’s resting faces create ripples through the show as they contend with the very story they’re telling — whether to use it to destroy someone's ego, to rescue their dignity from the ruins of bad decisions, or to simply accept their reality as inevitable.

What We Did Before Our Moth Days summary

When Tim is interrupted during a liaison with the alert that his famous writer father has died at 45, the event sets off a sequence of recollections and memories of how the family, once seemingly normal and content, began to corrode through ordinary actions of disregard, pretension, possessiveness, and dishonesty.

What to expect at What We Did Before Our Moth Days

What We Did Before Our Moth Days runs 3 hours and includes two intermissions. Told monologue-style with each actor sitting with mugs of tea in front of window panes bearing occasional projections of fluttering moths (by Bill Morrison), scenic and costume designer Riccardo Hernández and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton’s modest approach has a contemplative, almost funereal mood.

What’s especially striking about the show is observing the people who are not speaking. Davis’s resting face is pensive and serene. Hamilton’s is, like his character, saddled with a whiff of smarm. Early’s furrowed eyebrows betray the effects of realizing the extent of his family’s decisions and avoidances, and the powerful Dizzia’s expression becomes loaded with the purse of her lips. They can hear how their various vantage points affirm, contradict, or complicate one another’s stories without explicitly acknowledging it. Their plaintive, silent faces are as crucial to the show’s storytelling as its spoken parts.

What audiences are saying about What We Did Before Our Moth Days

What We Did Before Our Moth Days has received polarizing responses from audiences thus far, with some criticizing the length and minimal staging, and others saying the thoughtful writing and performances make it worth the sit.

• “A Franzen-esque story told by four seated individuals. 3.5 hours and 2 intermissions tested me, but it was very well written.” - Mezzanine user Kyle Heiner
• “The play is interesting. It’s more like a series of monologues, as there is only one segment where two of the characters actually interact with each other. For most of the time, all four actors remain seated in the four chairs on stage. The characters all have relationships with each other and refer to each other in their monologues, but it is like Rashomon, in that they’re all recounting their common experiences from individual perspectives.” - Reddit user u/Equivalent_Net_8983
• "Whatever it was trying to express about bourgeois hypocrisy amongst the artistic elite has been already said, so many times. All too often, the dialogue was stilted and even the mostly excellent cast couldn't transcend those lines." - Reddit user u/Head-Movie-9722
• "Walking out of the theater, I turned to my wife and said 'I didn’t like it … but I liked not liking it.' Today, I can’t stop thinking about it. [...] The way I keep coming back to it today reminds me of eating a meal that’s so spicy you can’t help but take another bite and another and another. Enjoyment is not the reason and I couldn’t tell you what is, but I want another bite." - Reddit user u/cama29
• "You'll hear great talk and see some exquisitely careful directing and writing, which says exactly what it means to say, and is drama for adults." - Reddit user u/prenezisbell

Who should see What We Did Before Our Moth Days

• Wallace Shawn and André Gregory are legends of stage and screen, memorably collaborating with filmmaker Louis Malles on the arthouse film My Dinner with André among others. Decades later, they’re still impressive artistic partners, uncovering the grotesquerie and beauty at the center of the human heart.
• Hope Davis has long been an essential part of American cinema, television, and theatre, from The Daytrippers and Synecdoche, NY to her Tony-nominated role in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage to HBO’s Succession. Fans of her work wil definitely want to catch Davis’s at once droll and wily performance here.
• Fans of John Early’s comedy, including his collaborations with Kate Berlant and an iconic role on the TV series Search Party, will want to check out his sardonically melancholy take as a son hit by the wave of consequences his famous father wrought.

Learn more about What We Did Before Our Moth Days off Broadway

Storytelling rarely feels so captivating and bleakly funny as in What We Did Before Our Moth Days. The series of monologues expertly capture how the informal savagery we commit against one another is cosmically paired with moments of grace in life, like the beat of a moth’s wings caught between the beak of a blue jay.

Learn more and get What We Did Before Our Moth Days tickets on New York Theatre Guide. What We Did Before Our Moth Days is at the Greenwich House Theater through May 10.

Photo credit: What We Did Before Our Moth Days off Broadway. (Photos by Julieta Cervantes and Luis Manuel Diaz)