Put Your Pants On
Wallace Shawn’s new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, has a fascinating construction: four actors sit facing the audience and, in monologue, take turns telling the interweaving stories of their lives. In the final minutes of the show, two characters are in dialogue, but otherwise we spend more than three hours bearing witness to transfixing, witty monologues, each one a jewel box of insight and metaphor, each delivered by stellar actors - Josh Hamilton, John Early, Hope Davis and the always excellent but here especially riveting, Maria Dizzia.
There’s some really gorgeous, electric writing about desire, marriage, sexual suppression, infidelity, privilege and self-absorption. I thought I would have to forgive the production for not really understanding women - their deep desires, their deep sorrows - and whew boy, I was wrong. Wallace Shawn, he understands!
Maria’s performance is so astonishing. My God she is good. Incandescent, true, funny, devastating. There is a monologue she gives that I would literally show up to the theater ten more times to see her do and see the audience experience. I know her a bit - we went to the theater for my WSJ column and I once cast her in a screenplay reading of a feature I wrote, playing a character I based on myself. This is an actress who takes a script and through it releases the musicality of human existence. Without a single false note.
All that said, the play is odd and the production not quite right yet - I saw it in previews so some of these issues might get fixed by opening night on March 5 - but it is IMO about 35 minutes too long and there are plenty of places to trim - both at the beginning and the end. The play and production would benefit enormously from an edit that centers Maria’s character more. I think we need only a tablespoon of John Early’s character but instead we get three cups.
I give this show my highest recommendation - but only if you can handle a play that is long and not neat and tidy. It’s running at the Greenwich House Theater and you can purchase tickets here.
At the end of act one, when the lights went up, the woman sitting next to me asked, “Was that the end of the play?”
I laughed. “No.”
She said she’d only been to five plays in her life. Imagine that? She was beautiful and wearing a beret.
“I thought you were an actress,” I said.
“I’m an engineer.”
“How did you end up here?” This wasn’t a play for people who’d only ever seen five plays. She explained that she got dumped the night before and her friends said she had to get out and do something interesting and one of them gave her a ticket to this show.
“Better days ahead,” I said. “Next guy’s coming soon.” I was just being some nice lady she happened to sit next to, a role I love to play.
She went and described the circumstances of her dumping: she’d gone to her boyfriend’s apartment and made a big dinner for him and his friend. When her boyfriend went to the bathroom, his friend told her that he loved who his friend was when she was around, and her heart swelled. This boyfriend had barreled into her life seemingly already loaded with love for her from their first moments together; it had taken her longer to get to know and trust him. “I mean he’d never even seen me angry at the airport, how could I believe that he loved me, you know what I mean?” I did.
They’d been together for three months. After dinner, the friend left, and she found her boyfriend in his bedroom wearing only boxers. “I’m having doubts about us,” he said. And then he broke up with her.
“What did you do?” I asked her.
“I said: Put your pants on.”
“Good. What a dumb dumb. I’m so sorry,” I said. “Onward.”
“Onward,” she said.
But it was a fresh heartbreak, so instead of onward, she started describing the different kinds of breakfast sandwiches she’d been making him. And she couldn’t stop. “Oh! There was one with scrambled eggs and melted cheddar on sourdough with gochujang mayo…”
“What a complete moron,” I said.
She began to offer a complicated analysis, that he self-sabotages, blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah. Generally I loathe interrupting people, but I interrupted her. “I am completely uninterested in him,” I said. “He’s not going to make the cut when you remember your life’s great romances.”
She dropped the recitation of breakfast sandwiches and quieted. “I probably won’t even remember his name,” she said.
“You probably won’t even remember his name. You might remember the moment with the boxers. Because in the face of rejection, you didn’t act desperate.”
“I said ‘Put your pants on.’”
“Yeah, you did,” I said. “The more you get older, the more you’ll see how screwed up so many people are, how many people are just on earth gradually destroying themselves and others. But it becomes less interesting, which is a good thing. I hope it will become less interesting to you.”
She was 32. She nodded.
“Someone is going to find you and cherish you,” I said.
She brightened. “I mean, I can build a computer. I made the pants I’m wearing.”
“You can build a computer and make pants?”
“Yeah!” she said.
“And those breakfast sandwiches!”
“Yeah!”
“I mean, what could that guy do?”
“He’s a musician.”
“Oh,” I said, and sighed.
There were things I would have shared if we had more time. That she doesn’t have to be able to do impressive things to be loved. That she hadn’t done anything wrong, that a new relationship just isn’t an engineer-able thing. In the play, Maria’s character had described it as finding oneself with another person in a room that feels heightened and amazing. You don’t build that room, though. It lands around you. And, yeah, sometimes the room just vanishes and there’s no path back.
“There are so many wonderful men,” I said. “They’re sprinkled here and there all over New York. It was such a good move to come here tonight. I mean, I could have just as easily been a hot guy.”
She laughed. “OK.”
It was time for the next act to begin. The house lights went down.
“I’m in the best fucking city in the world,” she whispered.
“Yes, you are,” I whispered back. “You are in the best fucking city in the world!”
My neighbor Jeff is a broker who has this stunning new listing for Rothko’s former home in the East Village. Are you currently on the hunt for something like this? I went to see it and the pictures can’t quite convey how sleek but also special the place is. Jeff stuck his neck out for me when I was looking for a new home and I would love it if one of my Refreshments readers ended up buying and living in this special home.
There’s a list of playwrights and choreographers whose shows I never want to miss and Michelle Dorrance is on that list - she has a new piece she’s choreographed for Trinity Irish Dance Company at the Joyce this week - I’m going and so should you!
Art works by Akea Brionne by whose work is now on view at Lyles and King.
Thank you for reading and thanks especially to my paying subscribers.
I will leave you with this gem.
xo Lizzie
PS - I have room available in my 7-week Zoom memoir and personal essay writing class beginning March 27th. For more info and to register, check out my website.
I love the review, the story and the art. But especially the story!
Thank you for this phenomenal post. I want to see a play about you and your new engineer friend!