SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A new play off-Broadway poses an unsettling question - when we die, how do we account for our lives? A father, mother, son and a mistress tell their stories about decades of love, joy lies, betrayal, hedonism and hurt as they sit in four chairs that face the audience. "What We Did Before Our Moth Days" stars Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, John Early and Josh Hamilton. It is the latest play by Wallace Shawn and is directed by Andre Gregory. They are one of the most enduring partnerships in theater, perhaps best known for their collaboration on Louis Malle's film "My Dinner With Andre." They have worked together for more than five decades and join us now from our studios in New York. Thank you both very much for being with us.
ANDRE GREGORY: Thank you.
WALLACE SHAWN: Delighted to be here.
GREGORY: You have a great voice, if I may say so.
SIMON: Well, that's nice of you to say. I like your voices myself. I think...
GREGORY: Oh, thank you.
SIMON: I think they're great. How did you decide to work together, or did you? Did it just happen?
GREGORY: Oh, that's a good story. Wally?
SHAWN: Well, we were introduced by the writer Renata Adler in, I would say, 1971. Andre had directed a version of "Alice In Wonderland." I couldn't help bringing an envelope full of my plays to give to Andre.
GREGORY: As I was reading them, I was walking around our apartment saying to my wife, listen to this. Listen to this. And from that moment, I think Wally has been my favorite American playwright.
SHAWN: And, yeah, we have found some kind of remarkable compatibility of taste.
GREGORY: I don't think that there's been a collaboration as long as ours. Can you think of one, Wally?
SHAWN: People didn't used to live as long as we have.
GREGORY: That's true.
SHAWN: So I think we might be record breakers. I don't know.
SIMON: Ah. Well, we're lucky. And let me ask you about "What We Did Before Our Moth Days." Wallace Shawn, how long have these characters been rattling around inside of you?
SHAWN: Well, I suppose I probably started writing the play, I don't know, five years ago. Initially, I didn't know how many characters there would be or who they would be, but they all became quite real to me. We've been working for a year and a half, anyway, off and on, with the actors. And now those characters have been really created over by Andre and the actors. They're not the same people they were when I put them onto the piece of paper.
SIMON: I got to ask you, Andre Gregory, most of the play is in monologues. How did that influence your staging and your direction?
GREGORY: Well, my task is to try to bring out what I think the writers' intentions are. And in this case, it seemed to me that total simplicity was called for. In this, there is not that much movement.
SIMON: There's a moment when a character turns their chair slightly to another character. And that's almost like an earthquake.
SHAWN: (Laughter).
GREGORY: Well, that's what's so much fun about it is one turn of a chair can become, like, the best kind of choreography Jerome Robbins ever did. I love it. It's - I mean, it's in the play, the play you've never had a scene before and now you have a scene because I don't like staging very much myself. I was quite thrilled (laughter) to have a moment where suddenly somebody turned a chair, and that was striking.
SIMON: And, Mr. Shawn, I've got to ask you a tough question 'cause the father, who was a writer, his long-standing infidelity is kind of an open secret, but the son doesn't discover it until his father has died. Do you know how that feels?
SHAWN: (Laughter) You're...
GREGORY: Very tactful.
SHAWN: You're very tactful. And my family, I don't know if it was more bizarre than the family of most of the people who were listening to your show, but it was slightly more well-known. My father was a somewhat known man.
SIMON: Editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn. A legend.
SHAWN: And it was known - you know, it's publicly known that he had a long-standing girlfriend and as well as being married to my mother. So that was the structure of our family, although what's true of my family that I didn't learn about it till I was about 35 or something of that nature, but I did know about it long before my father died. Obviously, there's a lot of grief that came from that, and some of that grief is in the play.
SIMON: I want to ask you both, after all these years, five decades of working with each other, can you still surprise each other?
SHAWN: Oh, he surprises me every day. I never know what Andre is going to think or feel. I mean, it doesn't even occur to me that I might. So...
GREGORY: I don't either.
SHAWN: I mean, we have no habits. So...
GREGORY: We're like turtles without shells.
SHAWN: Yes, exactly.
SIMON: I'm trying to get hold of that. But...
SHAWN: (Laughter).
SIMON: Another theme I detected. How long are parents truly responsible for their children?
GREGORY: I think that never ends. Even though one of my children is 62 and my daughter is 59, I feel particularly responsible for them now, I guess, in an odd way because what's happening in our world is so terrifying. And I thought they might get another kind of world. So even though I don't know what to do about it, I feel a responsibility for them.
SHAWN: And I don't have children, but my parents are both unbelievably active in my life, although they are no longer living. I mean, I think about them constantly and what they would think about me. I feel they're still quite responsible.
SIMON: Let me ask you. At this point in your lives, one of you being, I guess, 82, the other being 91, a lot of this play has the characters looking back on their lives. How much time do you spend looking back, or is it forward?
GREGORY: Well, looking forward at 91, going on 92 is a little hard. But I don't spend much time looking back because, strangely enough, I have no regrets. And last night, as I was watching the show, which was extraordinary, I was thinking, wow, what an astounding thing that entering my 90s, I could still enjoy a curtain call with Wally and the actors. You know, that's amazing.
SHAWN: I've never thought about the future, and I still don't. I do think a lot about the past and those who are dead. And I'm still puzzling out my childhood. But, I mean, I'm 98% absorbed in the present. And, you know, theater is so incredibly absorbing. And, I mean, I would love to live into my 90s, and I don't understand why death - it is terribly unfair, and younger people don't really understand the bitterness that I feel that it's all going to be taken away from me. I don't see why that has to be done but - I mean, I do understand that without death, well, the Earth would be terribly overcrowded with dinosaurs, and we would never have even come about.
SIMON: Right. Eaten by the woolly mammoths.
GREGORY: Yeah.
SIMON: I hope you both do another play.
GREGORY: Well, I hope you're right (laughter).
SHAWN: Very kind of you, and we'll see.
SIMON: "What We Did Before Our Moth Days" is the latest play, perhaps more to come, by Wallace Shawn, directed by Andre Gregory. And it's now playing at New York's Greenwich House Theater. Gentlemen, thank you both very much for being with us.
GREGORY: Oh, thank you.
SHAWN: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
