Wallace Shawn’s first play in ten years, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, directed by André Gregory and featuring Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, John Early, and Josh Hamilton, closed in May after a sold-out run at the Greenwich House Theater. Facing the audience were four chairs, one for each of the play’s four characters: Elaine, Elle, Tim, and Dick. Shawn’s characters almost always have these kinds of names, as if they come out of American children’s stories in which everyone is innocent, when in fact they are trapped in deadly stories of experience. Each actor came onstage with a warm drink, a simple gesture of domestic charm, before they began their painful story, told through alternating monologues in a relaxed form of speaking at which Shawn’s characters have become more and more adept—stunningly casual in their ability to make explicit what is usually never explicit, with an unbearable clarity about hidden motives.
It’s possible, I was thinking, that this playwright in his eighties is the most contemporary writer I know.
The first thing I saw by Wallace Shawn was almost thirty years ago. I was maybe eighteen, and I happened on a film of his play The Designated Mourner, with Mike Nichols and Miranda Richardson. I knew Shawn only as the kindly teacher in Clueless or the beaming sexual maven of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, as a gently comic character actor, and now here was this film in which three characters spoke directly to the camera, telling a story of political violence and degradation. I had never heard language used this way, in a stylized version of the tone used in the bourgeois home of my parents, and certainly I had never encountered contemporary art of such moral accuracy. I felt I knew these adults, even though unlike anyone in my own life they talked musically and manically, and I liked this combination very much. Through these monologues Shawn seemed to teach the lesson that, contrary to the prevailing assumption, language was never intended for clarity or fidelity to the facts. It aimed instead for complete obfuscation, always dependent on the myth of what someone in The Designated Mourner calls “the essential sweetness of our human nature.”
Who was this genius? I wondered. All I could find was a Faber selection of four of his plays, which I read with avid delight, and so, when I went to university to study literature and decided that I wanted to put on a play, I directed A Thought in Three Parts, which is at moments so luridly sexual that it caused me some local controversy, just as it had caused Shawn controversy in New York at its first performance in 1976. It was my first and only escapade in theater, after which I realized that I disliked theater intensely, a dislike that was somehow linked to the basic essence of it, the psychopathic, relentless enforcement of an unconvincing illusion. But I never stopped loving Shawn’s plays because they seemed to share and understand this hatred. The hatred was part of their allure. They were based on such an aesthetic of the explicit that the question of a play’s reality was irrelevant.
Of course, hovering over any attempt to think about Shawn is an apparent contradiction, a version of which I had already experienced: that plays of such unnerving astringency have been written by Rex, an anxiety-ridden toy dinosaur. In his roles in Toy Story and Clueless and The Princess Bride and Gossip Girl and many other movies and shows, Shawn as an actor has developed a Hollywood shtick of shimmering ambivalence, with an expression of bemused wonder and a voice so unique that he is, as he has noted, “frequently summoned to provide a voice for talking animals of every kind in cartoons intended for five-year-old children,” and it can be unnerving to have these figures shadowing the plays he has written, unnerving because the plays are so ruthless. They are absolute in their themes of pleasure and guilt and responsibility, and in the directness with which they approach these themes. But this apparent incongruity is just the proof of their basic wisdom—that civilized society is maintained through lives of such internal contradiction that it represents a kind of insanity. And what’s so unusual is that this wisdom is staged not through some traditional Ibsenesque exposure of hypocrisy, a mismatch between what a character does and what she says, but through the total frankness of Shawn’s characters, exposing themselves in hyperrational monologues, as they try to gather the incoherent elements of their selves together.
The hardest element for people to incorporate into their sense of themselves, it seemed in his first plays, was desire. These plays were festivals of the sexual, of gonzo fantasy, and they existed at the limits of what was sayable or stageable. In an essay looking back on these early works, Shawn sadly recalled the resulting mismatch between his intentions and the audience:
My first professional production in New York (in 1975) provoked a level of hostility in its small audience that was seriously disturbing. In my second production, the anger of the audience seemed to diminish a bit, but they seemed stricken and miserable instead—hurt, or baffled.
The plays were Our Late Night and A Thought in Three Parts, followed by Marie and Bruce. They were dream plays that were also highly realistic, hectic with carnivalesque sexuality and delicate idyll. One character reminisces about a woman whose
vagina was just incredibly tight, you know? It was just like being gripped by a hand. I mean, I remember, by the time we were finished, my penis was absolutely bright red—I mean, it looked just like a raw piece of meat, or fish.
Another, meanwhile, can just softly outline her ideal day:
I must say sometimes I rather would like to lie in bed all day and all night and just have tea and toast and jam, if a maid would bring them, I mean. I rather would like to solve little puzzles, and do little drawings, and write little plays to read to myself.
They seem sometimes so sweet, these characters, and sometimes so deranged! And the discovery of this theater was that the two states are really versions of the same thing, because our pleasures are always dependent on the cooperation of other people, and this may well be both a moral and a political problem. By the early 1980s a kind of crisis was therefore emerging in Shawn’s writing, first in My Dinner with André, a movie in which Shawn, playing himself, sits down to dinner with his friend the director André Gregory, also playing himself—a movie apparently about Gregory’s midlife crisis:
You would occasionally hear that he’d been seen following around at the heels of some Buddhist monk or else that someone had seen him at a party, and he’d been telling people that he’d talked with trees or something like that. It was obvious that something terrible had happened to André, and the whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous.
As Gregory explains it in a deserted high-end restaurant, his crisis is mostly about what theater making should be, how it might be possible for theater to produce something real, but it is also about the related horror of a certain way of living in America, of going to parties where “nobody knows what’s going on. And I mean, it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons that we don’t know what’s going on is that when we’re there at one of these parties we’re all too busy performing.”
In the movie, Gregory is a kind of priest of high seriousness. There is no doubt in his disapproval of bourgeois corruption. But the film’s persistent comedy lies in Shawn’s gentle demurral, his agreement that absolutely, bourgeois life is indefensible, and yet it’s delightful as well:
I mean, I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography and, you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night still there for me to drink in the morning.
They seem so innocent, bourgeois pleasures! But the crisis that transformed Shawn’s writing in the 1980s may perhaps be summed up as the realization that there is no such thing as an innocent pleasure, that we the civilized, the educated, might believe we are living the life we have been told we are leading by the systems that surround us, by our families, our education, our class. We believe that while in many ways the politics of our governments and public institutions may not be ideal, we ourselves are moral. And it is very frightening to discover that we are not just complicit in these systems but are actually benefiting from them. It is an insight that is sometimes dismissed by critics as too obvious, or too class specific. In his Paris Review interview with Hilton Als, Shawn beautifully and openly said:
I wish there were more plays about a life that is exactly like mine. I would love that! If the program says, “An apartment in Manhattan today,” I’m thrilled! And if it says, “An apartment in Chelsea, in Manhattan, today,” where I live, I’d be even more thrilled.
Certainly Shawn’s theater is written from a position of privilege. This is undeniable. But it also maintains that if you are in the audience of this theater, you are already privileged, even if that is oddly difficult to admit—just as it is even more difficult, maybe impossible, to give that privilege up. And the form Shawn arrived at to explore this or prove this in his great works of the 1990s—The Fever and The Designated Mourner, plays that seemed designed to corrupt their audience into self-recognition—was the direct monologue, in which characters divulge their guilt in dreamlike slabs of language.
And now we have this new play, which at first seems very different. It has no obvious political anger. Instead it returns to the sexual themes of his earliest plays but without their lurid detail—an apparently gentle exploration of bourgeois adultery.
In Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of Stalinist Russia, Hope Against Hope, there’s a moment of quiet judgment on the poet Boris Pasternak, who had managed to survive the regime:
In his article on Hamlet, Pasternak wrote that the Prince’s tragedy was not his lack of will, but the fact that in carrying out the act incumbent on him as a son, he would lose his birthright—that is, his “ticket for a seat by the columns.” Moscow had belonged to Pasternak from the time of his birth. There was a moment when he might have felt he was ready to give it up, but the moment passed and he remained in possession of his heritage.
It is a terrible judgment, maybe irrefutable, but it is also a kind of injustice toward Pasternak, because no one likes to refuse an inheritance. And just as Moscow seemed to belong to Pasternak, it would have been easy for Shawn in his childhood to believe that New York belonged to him. He was the son of William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, and so he grew up in the 1950s and 1960s as a kind of prince. “And I was thinking this morning,” he told Als in that Paris Review interview,
that probably not many people who’ve been interviewed for The Paris Review have really been preparing for their interview for fifty or sixty years as I have—because, you know, I read my first Paris Review interviews when I was probably twelve. I’m now sixty-six, and I think I probably did think in some way when I was twelve, I will be a writer one day, and I will be interviewed by The Paris Review.
Still, Shawn did begin the endless process of denying this inheritance, and it is a proof of his courage and talent that in his plays he manages to stage the traumatic delights of such a divestment. Perhaps it was made easier for him by a secret that had structured his childhood: his father was in a decades-long relationship with one of his New Yorker writers, Lillian Ross. Or maybe more precisely it was the delayed revelation of this secret—Shawn and his brother found out only as adults—that allowed him his unusually intense perception of how ferociously bourgeois power likes to maintain a veil of illusion over its pleasures.
A similar story of a father’s hidden infidelity is roughly what the four characters in Moth Days—a father, a mother, a son, and the long-term mistress of the father—have to tell. All of them, it gradually emerges, are dead. It is a play told by four ghosts. The world they once lived in was a world of material comfort and meticulous culture in which everyone was a writer or a reader, the bourgeois world of small restaurants and parties and interesting books being published that has been Shawn’s subject forever. But this time something apparently more private is being examined: the infidelity of the father and the effect of this infidelity on the family. And it is told in the form of a kind of exalted table read, the four characters sitting facing the audience, so that almost all Gregory’s work as the director focuses on the extraordinary precision with which they inhabit these roles, as if to prove that the only real advance in theater design since the hieratic creations of Aeschylus is the chair.
The play has such a slouchy, secretive manner of composition that as I watched it I wondered if I would ever enter into its deeper meaning, until we reached a moment when Elle, the wife, played by Maria Dizzia with grave beauty, offered a sudden description of love and falling out of love:
To be delighted by another person for a minute or two is a miracle. How is it that we were made to be able to experience that? To be delighted by another person for an hour—that’s a greater miracle. Love. That comes to some people. We can’t make it happen. I see you, you come into a room, I love you. That’s a miracle. That’s grace. I don’t control that. And I keep feeling that delight, I feel it, I feel it. Today, tomorrow, the next day—then, oh, the day after that, I don’t. I’m sorry, love died, it’s dead. You kick it—it doesn’t move. It’s dead.
It’s as if there was a room filled with light, and I was allowed to live in it for three minutes, three hours, three days, and then the lights went out, and that room had nothing for me anymore, and I was forced to leave it.
It is a description of our helplessness: we cannot resist the loss of a feeling any more than we can resist its arrival. But then Elle adds something that may be the moral center of the play and of Shawn’s work in general—how for a while she had her own trick of coming back to the room of love, of reversing what seemed irreparable, so that even as she wandered outside in the darkness,
I could see a path that went quickly back to the wonderful room in which I’d been so happy, and it was suddenly possible to go back there very easily, and the lights would be on there, and Dick would be there, and I was delighted by him again, I loved him again.
The world of Shawn’s plays has always been structured by something that could roughly be called absolute determinism, by a relentless system of causes. As Tim, the son, describes it,
Everything that happens in the world has a chain of causes leading back from it—this was caused by this, and that was caused by something-or-other, back and back and back to the original elements and the water and the wind and the ultraviolet light.
According to this theory, no feeling or action or perversion can therefore be judged, because there is always a prior cause:
It’s not anybody’s fault. We can’t get rid of the characteristics we have, we can’t trade them in for better characteristics, that’s just not possible. Our characteristics are mapped out in advance, the way everything is.
And yet against this is Elle’s quiet lesson in reversibility, this magical possibility of returning to the light-filled room of love, which is why the play’s deep sadness lies in the way her access to this trick is gradually blocked, as she increasingly inhabits a panorama of ongoing misery caused by Dick’s infidelity.
There’s a complicated game with innocence and responsibility and pleasure going on in this play, as in all Shawn’s writing. Josh Hamilton played Dick with such warm, gentle sincerity that it took a long time to realize that you had been corrupted, and to understand the weight of something Elle says early on:
Dick was a polite person, and a thoughtful person. He didn’t snarl. But at totally unexpected, shocking moments I’d feel the threat of his anger, the deadly threat of it, like the feather-weight touch of a razor blade against my throat.
All we know of Dick’s career is that he was a successful writer, some kind of best-selling novelist. But Dick never talks about writing; he talks about his true pleasure instead, which is nightlife:
After a while, after a certain amount of trial and error, I realized that one of the things that I really enjoyed was dropping in on some of the more louche, more slick, more shallow night spots and restaurants that happened to exist in the city I lived in…. The rather decadent venue called Arnold, for example.
The problem that the play hinges on is that the dream Dick has of private pleasure that does not hurt another person—“Would it be so unthinkable to have had sex with two people in the course of my life instead of just one? It would be so enjoyable for me, I really want to do it, and I feel I deserve to have that experience. And in what way would that hurt Elle? I asked myself”—is complicated, because pleasures are not all morally the same. Elle’s “great solitary joy” is reading, “just a small nice thing you could offer to yourself when you felt you needed something privately pleasurable at some particular moment of your day.” But other pleasures are not private because they inevitably harm other people, even if this hurt is invisible or apparently indirect. Elle tells us how Dick
quietly hinted to me that actually he’d found me somewhat possessive—there was a need to escape, in other words, a need to escape from my strangling embrace. And so I learned that I’d become a monster who strangled people. Of course, who had turned me into that monster? He had. He had taught me to be a monster, he had taught the monster to embrace, tightly, more and more tightly—he’d trained me.
Some pleasures exert a terrible silhouette; they leak all over the picture, which is why the play’s most poignant moment is when, toward the end, Tim goes to meet Elaine, his dead father’s mistress. Elaine still loves Dick; she loves him for what she sees as his refusal “to blame me for the fact that we got together, he struggled against the temptation to blame me for it, and he didn’t blame me for it. He never did.” These two characters have the only real dialogue in the play, and it centers on a sequence of tight complexity:
TIM: No, he punished my mother instead. Not in an obvious way, of course. He wasn’t cruel—not that I ever saw. Just cold at times. Just a little bit cold. Just suddenly, unexpectedly, a little bit cold. Ugh. What an ass he was, God, he was awful.
ELAINE: No, don’t say that. He wasn’t awful. Don’t you remember him? He was a very sweet, warm, loving man.
TIM: Yeah, I know. Yeah, he was. But then—why did he make everyone else so miserable? If he was so warm and loving? Do you know what I mean?
ELAINE: Well, I wasn’t miserable. Were you miserable?
TIM: Yes, I must say I was, really, although you could say, so what. I mean, so what, really. It certainly doesn’t matter.
ELAINE: Well—
TIM: But you weren’t miserable. You were all right.
ELAINE: Well, it was the best time of my life, and I don’t expect anything better will happen to me, and I’ll always remember it with happiness, if we’re going to be absolutely frank.
Something in John Early’s portrayal of Tim, so charming that it was also macabre, helped make this scene even more disturbing or sad, but really the writing is enough. It’s as if there were no such thing as a person, as if a person were many people depending on their various relations, which is why in the end no final judgment on them is possible. And yet there is a judgment in this play, the way there has always been judgment in Shawn’s work—a disappointment that is ethical as well as political. The family Tim has been born into speaks a language of decency: “The style, the style of behaving decently, I know that style ridiculously well, although I sort of wish I didn’t. I’d sort of love to forget all about it.” It is a style that allows adults not to admit to their failings, and the result is misery in those they profess to love and shame in their children, who are left feeling “as sleazy as they come,” not “decent” at all when considering their own apparently perverse desires. (This play could have been called Ghosts, if Ibsen hadn’t already used it for his own drama of fatherly disgrace.)
It turns out, I guess I am saying, that there is nothing gentle about this play. It is simply a new representation of the same principle: that to live lives of moral secrecy is deadly. And this remains the case even if Elle’s vision of love still stands as a miniature image of hope, as if it may always be possible in the overall inferno to find ways to be a good person, and one of them may be the very cautious process that takes place not only between two people but between an actor and an audience.
Why else, I suddenly thought, are these characters all dead? For each of them, death seems an unimportant event; it does not mark them; they have no revelation. Instead the bardo they now inhabit allows them to enter the clarity of a dream. Before Moth Days, Shawn made a version of Ibsen’s Master Builder Solness, and in the same way he converted almost all its action into a dream of the master builder Solness as he dies. “Master Builder Solness is a dream, whether you call it a dream or you don’t call it a dream,” he wrote in an afterword to the translation, “and it seemed better to call it a dream.” It is death that allows a person this dream of total accuracy. The other solution, for Shawn, is theater.
After I saw The Designated Mourner, the Shawn play that next dazzled me was The Fever (1990). This spring Shawn performed The Fever in alternation with Moth Days, as if to prove the works’ genetic similarity. The story this nameless narrator has to tell is one of gradual revelation, not of an interior secret but of an exterior one. They have grown up in soft comfort: “My friends and I were the delicate, precious, breakable children, and we always knew it. We knew it because of the way we were wrapped—because of the soft underwear laid out on our beds, soft socks to protect our feet.” It is a way of living that creates many addictions to unjust pleasures and hierarchies, but it is also radiant with gentle beauty:
I was born into the mind. Lamplight. The warm living room. My father, in an armchair, reading about China. My mother with the newspaper on a long sofa. Orange juice on a table in a glass pitcher.
And they read me a book about all the people in so many different uniforms who came to our house to help our family: coming from every corner of our beautiful city, the delivery man from the grocery store, the mailman with the mail. All so kind. And down the street, the old woman who worked in the bakery, who bent down and gave me sugar-covered buns. And, dear God, I never doubted that life was precious. I’ve always thought life should be celebrated.
This beauty, of course, is the form of concealment: “Something—a part of myself—has been hidden from me, and I think it’s the part that’s there on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw me out the window of a passing train.” What has been hidden from the narrator is their class, and the power that comes from belonging to this class. But it is so difficult to admit this! I mean, so difficult to admit this not just generally but about yourself, to admit that the “old woman who bent down and gave you sugar-covered buns did not love you. You were not loved the way you thought.” But it is true: the narrator’s life “is irredeemably corrupt. It has no justification,” it “is the life of someone who’s gotten away with something. And yet your fanaticism is so extreme that you won’t let that thought come into your mind.” Because everyone in this universe—including the audience, cramped against the wall of this monologue’s relentless rationality—is an impresario of acting behind one’s own back, maintaining a civilized sweetness only through a violence that is everywhere denied.
The Fever begins with the narrator sick in a foreign hotel, then remembering a birthday party in an elegant restaurant:
There’s the table with its sweet and pretty decorations, the fanciful centerpiece, pink and green, and there are all the women in bright red lipstick and the men in beautiful shirts, and all the gifts—outrageous, unexpected, and funny gifts—and there are the waiters serving the salmon and pouring the wine, and there I am.
Often Shawn’s characters think about restaurants or go to restaurants or remember beautiful restaurants, maybe because a restaurant is one of the last places in apparently liberal democracies where a person can enjoy the corrupting pleasure of being served, and in an essay he wrote many years later he analyzes the corresponding problem: that the pleasure is based on a fear, since “if we’re forced to get to know the people who serve us, we quickly see that they’re in fact just like us. And then we become uncomfortable.” A restaurant is pure performance, where certain people become ever so slightly unreal to other people, and everything in Shawn’s writing has been a way of making this unreality real.
But it feels important to linger on the beauty of these situations, the way Shawn lingers. Pleasure is corrupting because it is seductive, while Shawn’s theater is so politically disturbing because the prose of his narrators is so intimately persuasive, so magically stylish, with its rare delicacies and fantastical hidden hangouts—like the lemonade stall “by the lake in the park in that little alley of trees where they used to hang those enormous paper lanterns.”
That! Those! Because you know the place already. It is your landscape.