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Wallace Shawn Reflects on His Art in the Age of Antagonism

“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.

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: 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........

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