Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Downtown stalwarts still at it: Wallace Shawn & André Gregory’s MOTH DAYS, and Martha Clarke & John Kelly’s BUGHOUSE

• By drediman
• March 20, 2026
• No Comments

Currently Off-Broadway, you’ll find a pair of productions that find stalwart downtown theater-makers — namely Wallace Shawn, André Gregory, Martha Clarke, and John Kelly — still at it. Here are my thoughts on their latest creative forays.

WHAT WE DID BEFORE OUR MOTH DAYS
Greenwich House Theater
Through May 24

One of the more enticing entries of this winter’s busy Off-Broadway season is Wallace Shawn’s new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), a novelistic work centered around the death of a relatively famous fictitious author. From that nexus, we are immersed — through a series of intertwining monologues addressed directly to the audience — into his mind and the emotional inner lives of the people closest to him during his lifetime (e.g., his wife, mistress, son). The theatrical approach invites audiences to empathize with these characters via a sort of Rashomon-like storytelling akin to what Brian Friel accomplished in his seminal play Faith Healer. As usual, Shawn’s writing is urbane and acerbic, filled with delicious detail and candid, often morally ambiguous observations about life and love (or the lack thereof). Yes, at times the writing can be extraneous and gratuitous, but it’s exactly these traits that distinguish the his style. Thankfully, Shawn’s knotted and meandering text is conveyed with incisive clarity by his superb cast — Hope Davis, Joshua Hamilton, John Early, Maria Dizzia — and the understated staging by longtime collaborator André Gregory. The end result is a hypnotic and mesmerizing theatrical experience which, thankfully, unfolds in three digestible acts (including two intermissions) that gives each actor/character ample opportunity to take the spotlight. If you’re open to the slow burn, What We Did Before Our Moth Days will likely draw you in with its exquisitely detailed character studies and thoughtful account of human frailties. Note that during the show’s dark nights — Sundays and Mondays — Shawn himself takes the Greenwich House stage to perform his iconic monologue The Fever.

BUGHOUSE
Vineyard Theatre
Through April 5

Down at the Vineyard Theatre just off Union Square, renowned performance artist John Kelly has taken on the daunting task of morphing himself into 20th century “outsider” artist Henry Darger in veteran theater-maker Martha Clarke‘s funhouse production of Bughouse (RECOMMENDED), a stylized look into the tormented mind and imaginative flights of fancy of a singular human being. The very definition of a solitary man, Darger was a hermit-like janitor who hid himself from the world, secluding himself in his tiny Chicago apartment, where he created expansive and outlandish universes into which he regularly retreated. Be forewarned, however, that Clarke and award-winning playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) — who has crafted the play by largely drawing from Darger’s writings — have intentionally chosen to keep things pretty much opaque, leaving the motivation and rationale behind Darger’s unsettling and obsessive art for the most part unexplored — a decision that’s both refreshing and a bit frustrating. What we’re left with is a seemingly haphazard hallucination in which bits of autobiographical detail are meshed with stylized and dynamic flashes of his writings and paintings, evoked by the ingenious video projection designs by John Narun, Fred Murphy, and Ruth Lingford. Indeed, Bughouse is a theatrical experience that leans in on simply creating a vibe, one that thankfully doesn’t shy away from the more controversial aspects of the artist’s aesthetic (e.g., there’s more than a hint of pedophilia and perversities in his artistic output). At the center of it all is Kelly’s tortured and haunting performance, which impressively maintains an air of moody introspection throughout.