You may know him as Vizzini, the self-identified brains behind Princess Buttercup’s thwarted kidnapping. Or as Mr. Hall, the sexually frustrated Debate teacher who brings out the best in another blonde 90s icon. Younger fans may see him as Blair Waldorf’s step-dad, while the freshmen film nerds (c’est moi) first saw the twinkle during that famous dinner with André.
That’s right, people. I’m talking about your favorite character actor, Wallace Shawn. Right now in New York, the man of a dozen dear faces is the toast of the town. But this time the laurels are settling on his writing.
Shawn, the son of a New Yorker editor and longtime partner of a celebrated fiction writer, has been making knotty, ruminative plays about death and troubled institutions for as long as he’s been acting. And this May, he’s arrived at the Greenwich House Theater with his first new work in years. It’s a buzzy production. What We Did Before Our Moth Days stars John Early, Hope Davis, Josh Hamilton, and Maria Dizzia. Shawn developed it with his longtime collaborator, André Gregory—that very same André, from dinner.
Since its opening, Moth Days has caught the eyes and hearts of a public that was apparently hungry for knotty rumination on troubled institutions. In this case, the one on trial is the nuclear family. But-wait-there’s-more.
