Wallace Shawn will stage his acclaimed 1990 solo work The Fever in repertory with his new, full-cast play What We Did Before Our Moth Days at the Greenwich House Theater Off Broadway beginning next month.
What We Did Before Our Moth Days, announced in September, begins previews at the Greenwich House on February 4 ahead of a March 5 opening, with a cast of Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, John Early and Josh Hamilton directed by Shawn’s longtime collaborator André Gregory (My Dinner With André).
The Obie Award-winning The Fever will be performed by Shawn twice a week (Sunday and Monday evenings) in repertory with Moth Days beginning Monday, February 16. In the solo show, reads the synopsis, “a nameless narrator, confined to a squalid hotel room inside a poor nation, lies feverish as political repression takes place just outside his window. While he recovers, he starts to question his own privilege and in particular his complicity, as he grapples with the stark realities of inequality and human suffering.”
“I have always been a person who enjoyed the pleasures of life, including the turkey dinners and hot fudge sundaes that come with being an American,” Shawn says in a statement. “I began writing The Fever when I came to understand that to enable me to live the life that I lived, various other people had been starved and killed. And there’s undeniably a certain anxiety involved in enjoying that particular way of life today when one listens to the nakedly brutal pronouncements of the thugs who currently run our country.”
At first performed in the living rooms of friends, Shawn’s The Fever had its official premiere at The Public Theater in 1990 (winning the 1991 Obie Award for Best Play). Since then, it has been performed regularly in both theaters and unconventional spaces throughout the world including London’s Royal Court, the Avignon Festival, and at the ARCUB in Bucharest. In recent years, The Fever has been performed by other actors including Cate Blanchett (BBC, 2025), Lili Taylor (Off Broadway, 2021) and Tobias Menzies (London, 2015), among many others.
In 2004, the work was adapted into an HBO film starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by Carlo Gabriel Nero. The upcoming Off Broadway staging marks what the producers are calling “a rare theatrical convergence: a playwright both performing his most enduring solo work while simultaneously unveiling his latest ensemble play— offering audiences two distinct perspectives on Shawn’s evolving moral and political inquiries.”
The double venture is produced by Scott Rudin and Barry Diller, one of several projects (including the recently closed Little Bear Ridge Road and the upcoming Death of a Salesman revival, both on Broadway) in Rudin’s theater comeback after stepping away from the industry four years ago amidst accusations of bullying his staff.
