Whenever my friend M. sees a play that he doesn’t care for, he’ll say that the play is very long. This play is very long.
Wallace Shawn’s disposition to acidulous, lengthy monologue, salted with dialogue scenes, is stretched to three hours in the current material.1 A routine love affair, some sordid practices, struggles with achieving and accepting success: at moments it seems that we’re watching The Four Faces of Wallace.
The play’s formal twist, that some of these four characters are speaking to us from a, shall we say, unique vantage point, doesn’t redeem the work; indeed, that vantage point yields no special insights. Maybe the single dialogue scene, after the second intermission, between Tim and Elaine, established an emotional connection or intellectual bond between the two, but it’s not a strong one—I’d drifted off by then.
- What We Did Before Our Moth Days, by Wallace Shawn, directed by André Gregory, Greenwich House Theater, New York
1For a briefer example in my experience, see the film version of The Designated Mourner.