Those of us who couldn’t get tickets to see the production, and instead bought Wallace Shawn’s published play (What We Did Before Our Moth Days, Faber and Faber, 96 pages) are treated to the same alternating monologues by Dick, his wife Elle, his son Tim and his mistress Elaine, without listening to four actors sitting in chairs for three hours, “occasionally sipping from their mugs,” as one reviewer put it.
Shawn is among the playwrights – others include Tom Stoppard and Shakespeare – whose plays can also work as literature, as much appreciated on the page as in performance. Sometimes even more appreciated, since their density can be more easily absorbed by someone who can linger on the words. In any case, it seems especially apt to read this play, since the four New York characters are all readers, and writers. As the text reveals their lives, deaths, loves, lost love, secrets, sorrows and betrayals, we learn that Dick is a famous writer who fell in love with Elle in high school over their mutual intense love of reading. The most terrible thing about her discovery of his affair with Elaine (also a writer and editor), she says, is that it made her too nervous to read anything anymore.
To consider “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” as a book is not at all to disparage the world premiere production of it. indeed, I considered the reading an exercise in developing a more considered understanding of live theater through its absence. While reading this text, for example, I imagined where the audience laughs would be – and wondered whether Shawn constructed his sentences with them in mind. Early on, Dick recounts an interview with a journalist who asked him if he always wanted to be famous; he answered of course not, but added “Although I mean, you know, as a baby, I obviously would have come to understand, as all babies do that, if I wanted to be fed and touched and caressed, I’d better figure out how to get noticed, otherwise I’d starve, otherwise I’d languish all alone forever in my crib.” I wondered: Would the audience wait until “crib” to laugh, or is the sentence too long and involved to get a laugh? Was my amusement enhanced because I could read it (slowly, if need be; twice even?)
Dick’s comment about his infancy is in his first monologue, and occurs after he has died; the other three characters have already commented on his death. The play begins with Tim recounting what we eventually realize is his sexual encounter with a prostitute, which is interrupted: “And then the phone rang, and it was Mother telling me that Father had died, and as I held the phone to my ear, I was still leaking semen onto my new companion’s belly, and I remembered that Mahatma Gandhi in his autobiography had written about a somewhat similar experience he’d been involved in at the time of his own father’s death.”
This is the first of many indications that Tim is, as he eventually describes himself, “sleazy.” (Since I was reading the play, I could put it aside for a moment for an Internet search:
“Gandhi’s profound guilt over having sexual intercourse with his wife, Kasturba, while his father was dying in an adjacent room was a significant factor in his decision to take a vow of celibacy.”)
It’s in Dick’s first monologue that he also explains the title. His parents had many older siblings, so death was so common that he was baffled that his parents got upset…
“for some reason that I don’t remember I decided to call the day on which a person died not their death day but their ‘moth day’ – partly I’m sure because I always found moths to be quite unpleasant – they were vague and powdery and fluttery – and they weren’t horrible or terrifying, but they seemed to be blind, and I didn’t like the way tha they would suddenly appear and bump into me – and I guess I sort of pictured that when people died, they were sort of gently and vaguely flutteringly escorted into death by a flock of blind moths.”
I excerpt at such length to demonstrate its appeal as prose. (“It’s hard not to quote Shawn at length,” another theater critic writes in her review of the production; “he and his characters are spinning something out, thread by infinitesimal thread.”)
Language is what carried me through the storytelling, which worked better for me in individual moments and in its themes than as a narrative whole. Maybe that’s the difference the performances make.
