Two Playwrights Tackle Father Figures
If you’ve been going to the theatre lately, you’ve seen plenty of what I’ve started to think of as “piñata plays.” In this sort of story, a big family gets together and there are a lot of secrets. For most of the evening, the mood is darkly funny and a little ominous, as the siblings take undermining jabs and the in-laws roll their eyes. Then, in the final act, there’s a hugely satisfying, usually drunken throwdown in which every single person gets to take a whack at the piñata. All the secrets pour out, the revelations of infidelity and addiction and so on, as the group gives vent to the stuff that’s previously been unsayable—not to fix anything, mind you, since some things can’t be fixed.
These plays are often brilliant, and even lesser variants are fun to watch, because piñata-whacking itself is a naughty thrill, a cathartic fantasy for anyone with a family and/or a secret. But there’s something equally pleasurable—and more rare—about a play that pulls off the opposite trick, that revels in the way family members can love one another, can stay connected and build instead of destroying, even amid loss and uncertainty. It’s a hard thing to make dramatic and an easy thing to make corny, but it’s as authentic a theme as dysfunction. In the buoyant revival of Clare Barron’s 2014 father-daughter play, “You Got Older,” which is running under A24’s new management at the Cherry Lane Theatre, the creators find glory in something ordinary: an adult child and an aging parent trying their best.
The story is simple: Mae (Alia Shawkat), a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, newly single and unemployed (she’d been dating her boss), has come home to rural Washington to stay with her widowed father, who’s being treated for a “weird, mysterious cancer.” Her mom died of cancer, too, years earlier. She’s trying to be responsible, to behave like a grownup, but being home makes her keyed-up, antsy, and she retreats into her sexual imagination for comfort. The play consists of a series of sharp, realistic dialogues broken up with bursts of surreality: Mae and her dad talking awkwardly in the garden; Mae at a local bar, sporting bright-red short shorts and showing a near-stranger her rash; and, now and then, a fantasy cowboy, who keeps threatening to tie Mae up, whether she likes it or not.
Shawkat, with her warm, amused eyes and her mop of curls, is a perfect carrier for Mae’s air of abjection, flopping around her bed like a horny, gloomy Raggedy Ann. She is particularly adroit at playing charmers whom people forgive, sometimes too easily, like the millennial trickster Dory on the TV series “Search Party.” But the whole production is smartly allied with that openhearted sensibility, down to Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple, homey scenic design, in which wood-panelled walls glide around to suggest a garden, a bar, a hospital, a Midwestern bedroom. Directed by Anne Kauffman, the show trusts its audience not to need much guidance: when the set abruptly shifts to reveal Mae’s three siblings, it’s thrilling how instantly believable their teasing bond is.
Still, the most remarkable performance at the Cherry Lane is by Peter Friedman, who plays the kind of father you rarely see in art: a good one. It’s a hard sort of acting to describe, a spectacle of humility and self-awareness, unshowy and confident. A businessman with a genial, chatty energy, Mae’s father, facing mortality, is eager to help his daughter to know him better, not as a child but as an adult, to create a closeness that she clearly craves but is frightened of. As she raises walls, he builds bridges—and she scrambles across, absorbing bits of wisdom, a few of which feel tied to her secret thoughts about control. At one point, he startles her by explaining that, unlike her, he’s not terrified of feeling helpless: “Like going to the dentist. I love that. You just lie back and open your mouth. What can you do?”
Late in the show, Friedman’s character plays his daughter the song “Firewood,” by Regina Spektor, a songwriter whose work—droll and ardent—shares a lot with Barron’s play. It’s his cancer theme song, he explains; her mom had also had one. “You guys were weird,” she tells him—it’s Mae’s reflex word, her way of shooing away excess feeling. “Some of the lyrics are a little overdramatic, but I think it’s a pretty good song,” he adds, excitedly; he wants her to listen. She is reluctant to do it, but then she does it anyway, absorbing the song’s rapturous optimism. The audience does, too: we listen to that song all the way through, feeling the time pass.
Wallace Shawn’s haunting “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” directed by his long-term creative partner, André Gregory, is less a piñata play than it is a public autopsy, in which a family of erudite, self-possessed medical examiners stand over the corpse of their own legacy, poking it gently. There are four people implicated in the crime: Dick (Josh Hamilton), a rich, famous, charming, and extroverted New York novelist; Elle (Maria Dizzia), his saintly but quietly furious public-school-teacher wife, whom he fell for when he was sixteen; Tim, their squirrelly pervert of a son (played with the worst mustache in history by the delightful John Early), and Elaine (Hope Davis), Dick’s lover, a misanthrope with a clear-eyed understanding of her own choices.
It’s explosive material that, in a different artist’s hands, might have inspired a third-act screaming match over an Upper East Side dinner table, with snifters flying. Instead, Shawn stages his story as a panel of intimate testimonies, confided to us alone. The four characters sit on chairs, facing the audience. Sometimes they hold mugs. As the spotlight settles on each of them, that person unspools a monologue, a candid account of their origins, their desires and dreams, their galaxy of excuses and explanations. These stories slowly form a cracked family portrait, like a jigsaw puzzle. Are the characters speaking to us from beyond the grave? Perhaps. Overhead, images of moths float by—a reference to “moth day,” which, Dick confides, with a nostalgic smile, is the phrase he invented as a small child to describe the day we die, guided to the grave, “vaguely and flutteringly,” by blind moths. Then he tells us how it felt to die.
Going in, I’d assumed that “Moth Days” would be Shawn’s first whack at his own family piñata, one that involves this magazine. Shawn’s father was William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, referred to by the staff, worshipfully, as Mr. Shawn; after his death, at eighty-five, Lillian Ross, one of his star reporters, wrote a memoir revealing their decades-long affair. “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” is, it’s true, a play about an adult son who is wrestling with his famous father’s secret life. A key story is strikingly similar to a story from Ross’s memoir: Elaine rushes to Elle’s apartment after Dick’s death, then meets Tim at the door, as if she were a vampire requesting permission to enter. But the parallels aren’t precise; they’re more like images in a mirror that’s slyly tilted to disorient the viewer. Dick, played by Hamilton with a boyish glee, is a chipper, gregarious sybarite, while Mr. Shawn was an introvert’s introvert. Similarly, Early’s dissolute failson feels less like a self-portrait than like a darkly comic deflection, a gargoyle-ish stand-in for his creator’s anxieties. (I was reminded of the rule that, when you write a roman à clef, you should give your enemy a small penis, since he’ll never say that it’s him.)
Instead of an attack, the play offers something more unsettling, a meditation on the allure of a bad life and the trap of a good one. Hamilton’s cheerful Dick tells a story out of Eden, or maybe “A Star Is Born”: by his account, he was an unconfident nobody until he met his decent, dazzling catch of a wife—and then, as he bloomed, she faded. While she buried herself in lonely motherhood, untouched glamour, and the martyrdom of do-gooder work, Dick went morally bankrupt—gradually, then suddenly. “Well, I’ve written these things, and people really like them, and I think I deserve a little reward for that,” he explains, beaming, in a hypnotic homage to cocktails, parties with famous strangers, the louche pleasures of Manhattan night clubs, freedoms available only among wicked, clever peers.
It should feel damning. Wallace Shawn’s own artistic path began with the O.G. piñata play, one in which children reproach parents for their lies, selfishness, and neglect: at thirteen, long before he learned the truth about his father, he attended Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” then insisted that his parents see it, too. His early plays were finger-pointing confrontations with the audience, and in “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” from 1985, “The Designated Mourner,” from 1996, and the 1990 monologue “The Fever”—which Shawn has been delivering twice a week at the same venue—he built a reputation as a caustic moralist, slicing through bourgeois hypocrisies. “Moth Days,” however, doesn’t take sides. It’s defiantly tender. Hamilton—playing a narcissist who radiates innocence even when he describes betrayal—is easy to love. So is Dizzia, as Dick’s wife, the dark cello to his bright violin, particularly when her eyes narrow and she unleashes her truest, rudest, strangest feelings. Davis is dryly funny as a cynic who introduces herself as someone who had “never been the sort of person about whom people would say, ‘You can always count on her in an emergency.’ ” Early, as the family’s dented nepo baby, is a peculiar fount of profane insight, twisted but touchingly damaged. As I watched, the word “seduction” kept coming to mind: even at their worst (incest fantasies, grooming), you want to listen to this quartet forever, which is a good thing, since the play is three hours long. Could it be shorter? Sure—the second and third acts could have been combined. But I was never bored, and more often was swept away by the text’s candor and depth, its merciless generosity.
A single scene late in the play breaks the spell of Shawn’s structure, when two characters turn to each other and acknowledge, with relief, the quality they share: an honest sleaziness, not a false decency. It’s an observation that feels like the creator’s most penetrating one—the idea that, looking back on life, it may mean more to be understood than to be virtuous. Dick’s life leaves scars, which don’t heal. But the love between cruel people is a real love, too. ♦