My Lunch With Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory

"They've been artistic partners for more than 50 years and worked together for a decade before My Dinner With André, Louis Malle's 1981 film in which Gregory (theater director, expansive, extroverted) and Shawn (playwright, listener, a quizzical reaction shot in corporeal form) converse for 90 minutes over a meal. It may have been the talkiest movie of its generation, but it was an unexpected art-house hit. The latest piece of their shared project is Shawn's dark comedy What We Did Before Our Moth Days,"

"Of course I asked André Gregory and Wallace Shawn to dinner. How could I not? Well, it ended up being more of a late lunch. Gregory is 91, Shawn 82, and while they're both in good health, they're not much for a night out or a noisy room. So we meet at Cookshop, near their apartments in Chelsea, at 3 p.m. My Early-Bird Special With André doesn't have the same ring, but who cares?"

Gregory, 91, and Shawn, 82, met at Cookshop near their Chelsea apartments for a late lunch at 3 p.m. They have been artistic partners for more than 50 years and worked together for a decade before My Dinner With André (1981). That film featured the two in a 90-minute conversational meal and became an unexpected art-house hit. Their latest collaboration is Shawn’s dark comedy What We Did Before Our Moth Days, directed by Gregory. Four actors sit at the stage edge and recount intersecting lives and deaths from what seems to be the future. The timeline and narrative are fractured as a couple grows apart when the husband's novel-writing career rises, he joins a louche circle and has an affair, and their son later befriends the mistress. The play runs three largely actionless hours and depends on extended, unbroken monologues; many speeches run for multiple pages.

Read at Vulture