Indefensible Delights

Wallace Shawn’s first play in ten years, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, directed by André Gregory and featuring Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, John Early, and Josh Hamilton, closed in May after a sold-out run at the Greenwich House Theater. Facing the audience were four chairs, one for each of the play’s four characters: Elaine, Elle, Tim, and Dick. Shawn’s characters almost always have these kinds of names, as if they come out of American children’s stories in which everyone is innocent, when in fact they are trapped in deadly stories of experience. Each actor came onstage with a warm drink, a simple gesture of domestic charm, before they began their painful story, told through alternating monologues in a relaxed form of speaking at which Shawn’s characters have become more and more adept—stunningly casual in their ability to make explicit what is usually never explicit, with an unbearable clarity about hidden motives.It’s possible, I was thinking, that this playwright in his eighties is the most contemporary writer I know.The first thing I saw by Wallace Shawn was almost thirty years ago. I was maybe eighteen, and I happened on a film of his play The Designated Mourner, with Mike N...