George Prochnik at the Paris Review:
On the face of it, Moth Days is probably Shawn’s most straightforward domestic drama. In the three-hour play, a man and woman fall in love when they are young. By providing unstinting support over many years, the woman imbues the man with the confidence he needs to flourish as a writer. The couple have a child, who himself becomes an author of outlandish, erotic short stories. The woman works as a teacher in disadvantaged schools while the now-successful man increasingly gads about with a bohemian crowd; he eventually begins an affair with a fellow writer that destroys the family and blights all three of their lives. It’s a perfectly realistic setup, except that the characters are all speaking to us from beyond the grave. (“Moth day” is Dick’s euphemism for one’s deathday.)
Many aspects of the drama echo Shawn’s own family history. (“There’s only a very thin curtain between theater and life,” he wrote in the introduction to a 2022 essay collection, “if I may use the metaphor.”) His prominent-editor father had a multidecade affair with the writer Lillian Ross. Moth Days depicts a world in which books and authors still preside over the culture, as they did in William Shawn’s heyday at The New Yorker.
more here.
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