What We Did Before Our Moth Days

🦋🎭 WHAT WE DID BEFORE OUR MOTH DAYS — An Intimate, Unsettling Family Portrait 🎭🦋

Thoughtful, strange, and quietly devastating, WHAT WE DID BEFORE OUR MOTH DAYS marks the triumphant reunion of legendary playwright Wallace Shawn and iconic director André Gregory, collaborators whose work has long challenged how audiences think about morality, love, and human connection.

This riveting new off-Broadway play unfolds over a limited 12-week engagement at the Greenwich House Theater, inviting audiences into the private emotional lives of one intellectually curious, emotionally tangled family. Set in an urban world of intelligent, gentle, middle-class people, the story centers on a father, mother, son, and the father’s longtime mistress as they reflect—sometimes tenderly, sometimes painfully—on the choices that shaped their lives.

As the characters speak with disarming honesty, the play drifts through themes of love that both suffocates and liberates, tracing the kaleidoscopic paths of remorse, resentment, sorrow, desire, and fleeting joy. Shawn, long regarded as one of theatre’s most incisive moral thinkers, turns his attention fully to love itself—its contradictions, its costs, and its quiet power to define who we become.

The production features a remarkable ensemble cast including Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, John Early, and Josh Hamilton, delivering performances that are intimate, piercing, and often unexpectedly funny. At times surreal, at times profoundly human, the play echoes the beautifully strange spirit of Shawn and Gregory’s earlier collaboration, My Dinner with André, while carving out new emotional territory.

Philosophical yet personal, unsettling yet oddly comforting, WHAT WE DID BEFORE OUR MOTH DAYS is essential viewing for audiences drawn to intelligent drama, experimental theatre, and stories that linger long after the final moment.

📍 Venue

Greenwich House Theater
New York, NY

🎟️ Know Before You Go

• Run Time: Approximately 3 hours, including 2 intermissions

• Age Recommendation: Ages 12+

• Engagement: Limited 12-week run

• Genre: Contemporary drama / philosophical theatre

🌟 Why WHAT WE DID BEFORE OUR MOTH DAYS Stands Out

• Reunion of two downtown theatre legends

• Star-studded cast of acclaimed stage and screen actors

• Deep exploration of love, morality, and family

• Intimate off-Broadway setting

• Thought-provoking, strange, and quietly funny