‘What We Did Before Our Moth Days’ Off Broadway Review: Wallace Shawn and André Gregory Return, More Precious and Pretentious Than Ever

There’s a flip side to the “New York, New York” lyrics “if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere!”

What about all those people who can only make it in New York City?

Two prime candidates for that reverse category are André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, the city’s oldest Nepo Baby. They’re back, more precious and pretentious than ever with Shawn’s three-act three-hour play “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” directed by Gregory and produced by Scott Rudin and Barry Diller. Its world premiere took place Thursday at the Greenwich House Theater.

Rudin’s Playbill bio reveals that “Moth Days” is the producer’s third collaboration with Wallace. Think fast: What Wallace plays from the last century have received major revivals in this century?

Regarding Wallace’s latest effort, let’s begin with that twee title. Some of the characters in “Moth Days” talk about their own death. The character played by Josh Hamilton takes it a few steps further by talking about somebody else’s death, an event that takes place after his own passing. Hamilton explains the words “moth day”: it’s the day we die, because lots of moths gather around the new corpse to fly it off to the afterlife where dead characters like the ones in “Moth Days” sit around talking about “what we did before” croaking.

After seeing “Moth Days,” I worry more than ever about my moth day. Will I have to meet Shawn’s four characters, covered in the flaky and chalky remnants of moth wings, as Hamilton describes the insects? I’m already stocking up on moth balls.

In another example of preciousness, the Playbill for “Moth Days” gives the actors’ names but not the names of their characters. Let’s just refer to each of them here by the respective actor’s name.

Hamilton, playing a very successful novelist, engages in arguably the least eventful extramarital affair ever depicted on stage. His mistress (Hope Davis), however, is truly unique in the history of stage paramours. Davis never stops telling us how unpleasant she is. Do truly unpleasant people ever know they’re total creeps? 

Hamilton’s wife (Maria Dizzia) teaches in one of the city’s most challenged schools, its students very disadvantaged. It’s clear from what Dizzia tell us that Wallace Shawn has never stepped foot in a public school in a big city. Dizzia also doesn’t appear to remember what she tells us from one act to the next. She tells us she no longer loves her husband and fantasizes about an affair with a male acquaintance. Later, in a Medea-like fit of rage, she’s so upset about her unloved husband’s affair that she threatens to kill their teenage son, whom she does love. When her husband dies, Dizzia tells us that now, for the first time, she has the freedom to wear any blouse she wants, read any book she wants, listen to any music she wants. What? She wanted to wear Miu Miu and her husband made her wear H&M? These are problems?

This review is filled with the words “tells us” and that’s because “Moth Days” features the four actors sitting in chairs and directly addressing the audience to tell us their stories in very long monologues. Maybe that’s why the play’s website does not include any photos of the production. Who wants to attend a three-hour memorized reading disguised as a play?

There’s no action, with one major exception. The four actors do drink on stage. A lot. André Gregory’s direction gooses things up a bit with all those hot, steaming beverages. While three of the actors bring a mug of hot tea or coffee onto the grand funeral parlor set (by Riccardo Hernández), Davis enters empty-handed for the first two acts. Unlike the other actors, she also spends a great deal of time in acts one and two off stage. In a shocking development, the four actors switch chairs in the third act and Davis brings a mug of steaming tea or coffee onto the stage for the first time. Equally disconcerting, John Early (the fourth actor) returns empty-handed in act three. Maybe that’s because he does drink a lot of white wine that Davis serves him. This is the only moment in “Moth Days” where the characters are given any opportunity to interact. 

Gregory does something else that slowly emerges as the production’s most intriguing feature. He has encouraged, or allowed, Hamilton and Early to deliver sly impersonations of Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, respectively. Hamilton has honed Shawn’s ingratiatingly comic humblebrag to perfection. With the beatific smile of a dunce, Hamilton just can’t believe that — gee! — his novels are not only beloved by readers and critics alike but they earn him lots of royalties. Early brings to vivid life Gregory’s patented elitism, right down to that overly modulated mid-Atlantic accent, even when he’s telling us about his perhaps imaginary 13-year-old girlfriend — her name is Rapunzel — and his “astounding” penis. Early’s real identity is not revealed until late in act three, even though this character is talked about a lot in the two preceding acts. Even then, we never learn what makes his penis astounding. Is it astounding because it’s large or astounding because it’s small or astounding because it looks like, say, a pineapple?

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