Wallace Shawn’s ‘What We Did Before Our Moth Days’ Is Purgatory Done Right
#Wallace Shawn#André Gregory#What We Did Before Our Moth Days#My Dinner With André#East Village Basement#Monologues#Theater#Collaboration
📌 Key Takeaways
Wallace Shawn and André Gregory reunite for new work 'What We Did Before Our Moth Days'
The piece features interlinked monologues exploring life, death, and betrayal
Their collaboration continues from the 1981 film 'My Dinner With André'
The work is being presented at the East Village Basement in New York
📖 Full Retelling
In January at the East Village Basement in New York's East Village, actor-playwright Wallace Shawn and director André Gregory reunited to present their latest collaborative work 'What We Did Before Our Moth Days,' a collection of interlinked monologues exploring life, death, and betrayal that continues their artistic partnership that began with their 1981 film 'My Dinner With André.' The two artists, whose previous dinner conversation was immortalized by director Louis Malle, have once again engaged in profound philosophical discourse, this time transforming their exchange into theatrical material. Their recent dinner gathering mirrored their earlier conversations, as they moved from soup to dessert discussing art, humanity, and Gregory's theatrical and spiritual experiments that sometimes approached what could be described as Dionysiac proportions in their intensity and emotional depth. The new work represents a significant continuation of their artistic dialogue, bringing their unique collaborative style to contemporary audiences while maintaining the intellectual rigor and emotional vulnerability that characterized their earlier collaboration.
🏷️ Themes
Artistic Collaboration, Life and Death, Theatrical Performance
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors, to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of...
In theatre, a monologue (also spelled monolog in American English) (in Greek: μονόλογος, from μόνος mónos, "alone, solitary" and λόγος lógos, "speech") is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character...
Wallace Michael Shawn (born November 12, 1943) is an American actor, essayist, and writer. He is known for playing Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987), Mr. Hall in Clueless (1995), Dr.
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.”
