What We Did Before Our Moth Days Tickets

By: Wallace Shawn
Director: André Gregory
Cast list: Hope Davis (as Elaine), Maria Dizzia (as Elle), John Early (as Tim), Josh Hamilton (as Dick)
Sets: Riccardo Hernández
Costumes: Ann Roth
Lighting: Jennifer Tipton
Sound: Bruce Odland
Other info: Original music by Bruce Odland

Wallace Shawn, a student of morality whose plays have brought audiences frank truths about politics and sexuality, tackles the subject of love suffocating and freeing in his new play. Shawn and André Gregory have created a work that is as strange, and at times hilarious, as My Dinner with André, the film they starred in that became a cornerstone of New York art.

Shawn (who is also co-producing) said in a statement, “We don't understand ourselves, and we don't know why we do what we do. Ideally, then, dangerous weapons should be kept out of our hands at all times, but in romantic, sexual, and familial relationships we carry the weapon of our own feelings strapped to our chests whether we like it or not. This is a play about four intelligent and thoughtful people — mother, father, son, and father's mistress — living in a somewhat violent but sophisticated city.”

What to watch for

• André Gregory said in a statement, “My life in the theater has often been my life with Wally Shawn. I have been his acting teacher, his collaborator, his director, his friend. We are still going strong. Together.”
• “Wallace Shawn is the stage’s greatest moral philosopher," Pulitzer Prize winner Hilton Als wrote for The New Yorker.
• Wallace Shawn is known for playing Vizzini in The Princess Bride.
• Gregory directed Wallace’s play Grasses of a Thousand Colors at the Royal Court in London and, in a co-production with Theatre for a New Audience, at The Public Theater.