“Now our country is run by people who really believe in crushing the poor and killing them.”
“What We Did Before Our Moth Days” Wallace Shawn and André Gregory pose at the 90th Annual New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards at 54 Below on May 7, 2026 in New York City. (Bruce Glikas / Getty Images)
When we met late on a Wednesday afternoon at a bakery in Manhattan, as far as I could tell, Wallace Shawn wore the same black jeans he had worn just a few days earlier at the last performance of his recent run of his one-man play, The Fever. As our conversation was wrapping up, waitstaff swept around us to prepare for closing, just like the scene at the end of Shawn’s 1981 film My Dinner With André.
Wallace Shawn’s latest ensemble play, his first in a decade, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, touches on the porousness between life and art in the lives and work of writers. Or at least for Dick, a well-regarded, prestigious novelist played with a slithering naïveté by Josh Hamilton. Dick is the first to admit that he owes his career to the interest and devotion of high school sweetheart and mother to his child Elle (a devastating Maria Dizzia). Nonetheless, he embarks on an affair with a more mainstream thriller writer named Elaine (Hope Davis). For Elle, after the revelation of the affair, life with Dick “became a horrible kind of love, it became a distasteful kind of love.” All four characters speak directly to the audience, with the exception of one brief scene between Tim (John Early)—Dick and Elle’s troubled son—and Elaine.
Not long into the play, Dick tells us that “Moth Day” is a phrase he coined for the day a person dies. But only later do we understand the full significance of the title: Eventually, we realize that all four characters onstage are dead, telling the stories of their lives from beyond the grave.
The experience of slowly understanding these characters’ deaths as they share their often warped narratives of how they lived creates a strange and special intimacy between these performers, the characters, and the audience. But the monologue Shawn performs in The Fever captures a bourgeois man’s coming into political consciousness while in the midst of a horrible illness caught during a visit to a country in a revolution. Considered alongside The Fever, Moth Days deepens one’s understanding of Shawn’s body of work as an anti-colonial playwright and thinker in the vein of Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, and Lorraine Hansberry. As in the work of these other playwrights, one of Shawn’s enduring motifs from play to play is how a person’s politics take root in a family, and how a person might come to resist the beliefs of their origins. Ever the genealogical thinker, Shawn with his latest work brings his shrewd depictions of a literate, elite, often complacent Western collective unconscious to a play that resembles a family drama.
The Nation spoke to Shawn about The Fever, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, and the renewed political meaning latent in his work.
—Elaine Schiff
Elaine Schiff: It’s Wednesday, May 27. The play closed on Sunday May 24. This is the first interview you’ve done since closing. How are you feeling about the run?
Wallce Shawn: The run was an extraordinary high point in my life. The sort of thing that you cannot expect would ever happen. But somehow the four actors, André, and the script were a uniquely perfect combination. It’s almost too delicate to talk about.
The script itself is kind of ancient history to me. When I see the play, the script is so far away. I’m looking at the characters these people have created. Basically, when I go to the play, I’m going to see people that I have a deep love for. I mean, the theater is a very easy form of living. You don’t have to participate, really, if you’re in the audience. The relationship that you have is not reciprocal. So I go and watch the people I am so drawn to. I don’t have to interact with them. I just stare at them. It’s, I suppose, the way a baby looks at his mother. Nothing is asked of me. I can just sit in a trance and stare at these beautiful people.
It’s a long journey to get there from the point of trying to remember myself writing the play. Somehow, there’s a tranquility that’s been achieved because of everybody’s relationship with everybody, so that there’s a kind of peaceful space around the play. I’m not remembering, you know, as can be the case, moments of pain and struggle in the rehearsal process. As a writer, it’s possible to feel, well, “Joe never really got that line.” Or, “I wish it could have been more like this or more like that.”
I mean, I don’t usually feel that [way] in any play that I’ve done. But sometimes one does. Whereas in this [play,] I’m not thinking that.
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ES: That’s beautiful.
WS: So now, you know, it would be great to do the play in other places, to do it again. There are all sorts of possibilities. Of not totally saying goodbye to it.
ES: I noticed that on Sunday, a week ago, when I saw Moth Days and then The Fever back-to-back, that the plays share a reckoning with the theme of inevitability, or a theme of a kind of predeterminism. What do you think about inevitability at this moment in time? In your life?
WS: I don’t know if anybody can really believe about himself or herself that what I do is completely determined. You can believe it about everybody else! But I don’t even know what words you would use to refute your own sense that you’re making decisions. I don’t even know how you would describe that.
It’s easy to say, after the fact, that the specific decision that you made was inevitable. You couldn’t possibly have made a different decision. But that’s not how my brain anyway presents my life to me. My life seems to be presented as a multiple-choice questionnaire. And going forward, I have the feeling that I have a self, or I am a self, and I’m making these decisions.
And certainly if you watch, let’s say, the behavior of a bird, they seem to be making an awful lot of decisions. You don’t know what the motivation is. But you see the bird flies from one branch to another branch and all of a sudden leaps off the tree, then lands on your windowsill very far away. It seems the bird is making these decisions. Although after the fact, if you knew enough, maybe you could explain them, I don’t know.
Well, maybe, certainly one of the key sentences is when the speaker [of The Fever] says, “Of course it could have been predicted from knowing the things in this book [of my life]: where I was born, how I was raised, what an hour of my labor would probably be worth today, even though to me, from the inside, my life always felt like a story that was just unfolding in which nothing could have been predicted.”
And you know, [in Moth Days,] Elle, whatever was happening in her private life, she continued to teach. She resisted her husband’s suggestion that it was too hard and that she should quit. And she was a dedicated teacher for her whole life. And so, what she did before her “Moth Day” was quite wonderful. I think for me that’s an important point in the play. Because, you know, what she did was valuable and and great!
ES: How did you decide, “I’m going to do a run of The Fever.” Was that always part of [the plan for Moth Days]?
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WS: No, that was Scott Rudin’s idea.
ES: Were you resistant?
WS: Oh, no. I was thrilled! There was no persuading necessary. For me, it’s very gratifying to, you know, make my attempt to contribute something to the possible political conversation.
In some ways, it’s more interesting than it was 35 years ago. I mean, there were very few people 35 years ago who would openly defend sadistic projects. Now our country is run by people who really believe in crushing the poor and killing them, hurting them. People who believe in cruelty. So it’s more interesting to be doing it.
ES: On Sunday and in January, my sense in those rooms is that it was a quite receptive audience.
WS: No comparison. I mean, that part I don’t get fully. I don’t understand people’s responses. An enormous number of people came up to me after each performance and said, “Thank you for doing that.” Nobody said that 35 years ago!
ES: The gulf between the ideas of the theatergoing audience in the nineties, the theatergoing audience of today, and the ideas of the play might be closer.
WS: Yeah. I mean, I think in the ’90s, and also in the institutional theaters that I performed this in, a lot of people in the audience would have been… very politically moderate people, who would have thought that American intentions were benign. But maybe execution fell short.
Let’s say this: I don’t know if you’ve ever read Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech.
ES: It’s amazing. Absolutely.
WS: Harold Pinter… I mean I always find it amazing that he was given a Nobel Prize in Literature, and… instead of talking about literature, he talked about the menace of this particular country, that the United States was really the enemy of humanity in some terribly extraordinary way.
It’s certainly never been more true than at this very moment that, you know, the United States is the most powerful country, but people have always counted on it to behave with some restraint. And now, it’s led by a man who is threatening to use that power in any way that strikes him on any given day, which is terrifying.
And The Fever is basically saying, well, you know, the elite that I happen to be a part of, whether you want to call it an American elite or a Western-European-American-Canadian elite, well, [it] has gone much too far already…
ES: What is the role of the playwright, to you?
WS: Oh. Well I wasn’t thinking about that when I started. When I was I guess 24, maybe 23, I wrote an actual play. And I thought something I’d never thought before, which is: I have an ability. I can do something. And not only that, I thought: This is a great play. And I want to spend my life writing plays. [But] that’s not the role of the playwright; that’s just a guy who would like to do something that he thinks he can do…
I spent many many years [getting] people interested in putting on one of my plays and I didn’t get anywhere. So I didn’t have a role. My role was not as a playwright but as an unsuccessful playwright. Then, André took me up, you might say.
Then I went to England, and there…the concept of the role of the playwright was very real. The people I met, they were socialists! Did I know what that word meant? I had no idea. I really didn’t know. I mean I studied history, and I knew that there were people called socialists, but somehow, I didn’t know what that meant. But in their mind, the role of the playwright was to chronicle the actual world as it existed. And to show the truth about the world. And get the word out. And eventually lead to a better society. That was the role of the playwright.
And then, when my first play was done over there, A Thought in Three Parts… they have a lot of newspapers. About 18 bad reviews. Many of them worse than bad. Then on the weekend I got a couple of good ones. But that was—I mean I think the play opened on a Monday. So I had some bad days with no good reviews. And Hare, Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, and Barrie Keefe wrote a letter to The Guardian in praise of my plays, and in denunciation of the critics.
So, all of a sudden, I had a role. The role of the playwright at that point was kind of, uh… I was just writing what I wanted to write, but by the end of that week, I was a rebel against established society, or something of that nature! I mean if everybody had found A Thought in Three Parts delightful, then I would have been delighting an audience. But my role, apparently, was as a disrupter of the audience.
Elaine SchiffElaine Schiff is a playwright, filmmaker, comedian, and occasional critic based in Chicago, where she works as a fishmonger and teacher.