We are all waiting for something. A phone call that changes a career, a lab result that clarifies a future, or perhaps just the microwave to beep so we can eat a lukewarm dinner alone. We treat these gaps in our lives as obstacles. They are the "in-between" spaces we try to kill with infinite scrolls through digital noise. We want to arrive. We want the result.
Wallace Shawn, a man whose voice carries the nervous cadence of a hummingbird in a suit, suggests we might be looking at the clock all wrong.
In his play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, Shawn doesn’t offer a traditional narrative arc. There is no grand explosion, no neat resolution where the hero finds the lost treasure and learns a lesson about friendship. Instead, he places us in a space that feels suspiciously like purgatory, though not the fire-and-brimstone version found in dusty theology books. This is a modern, quiet, almost polite purgatory. It is the existential equivalent of a beige lobby where the magazines are three years old and the air conditioning hums at a frequency that makes your teeth ache.
The Art of Doing Nothing While Everything Is at Stake
Consider a woman named Elena. She is a hypothetical stand-in for every person who has ever felt like they were "almost" somewhere. Elena spends her days preparing for a life that hasn't started yet. She buys the right shoes for a promotion she hasn't earned. She practices conversations for a confrontation she is too afraid to have. Elena is living in her "moth days"—that fragile, fluttery period where one is drawn to the light but perpetually stuck hitting the glass.
Shawn’s work captures this specific, agonizing vibration. He doesn't look at the moment the moth hits the flame. He looks at the hours of circling.
Most writers are obsessed with the "moth" moment—the transformation, the crisis, the dramatic end. Shawn is the poet of the circling. He understands that the majority of human existence isn't the highlight reel; it’s the long, strange, often uncomfortable wait. By focusing on this, he manages to do "purgatory" right. He makes it recognizable. He makes it us.
The brilliance lies in the discomfort. In the play, characters navigate a landscape of memory and anticipation that feels both deeply personal and hauntingly hollow. It mirrors the way we treat our own histories. We look back at what we did "before," trying to find a pattern in the chaos. Did the choices we made matter? Or were we just killing time until the real version of us showed up?
The Invisible Stakes of a Quiet Room
There is a common misconception that for a story to be high-stakes, someone has to be holding a literal ticking bomb.
Shawn disagrees.
The stakes in What We Did Before Our Moth Days are invisible and, therefore, much heavier. The bomb is the realization that this—this waiting, this talking, this mundane exchange of ideas—might be all there is. If you spend your whole life preparing for the "real" part, what happens if the preparation was the actual event?
Imagine sitting across from a friend and realizing that the conversation you’re having about the weather is actually the last time you’ll ever speak. The weather doesn't matter, but the fact that you chose to spend your final grains of sand discussing a cold front is devastating. That is the Shawnian specialty. He takes the banal and coats it in a layer of existential dread so thin you almost don't notice it until you try to breathe.
The play functions as a mirror. When we watch these characters navigate their purgatory, we aren't looking at ghosts. We are looking at our own habits. We are looking at the way we use intellectualism to shield ourselves from feeling, and the way we use politics to shield ourselves from our neighbors.
Why the Drifting Matters
Critics often label this kind of work "challenging" or "abstract," but those are just polite words for "it makes me feel naked."
Shawn’s prose doesn't rely on the crutches of modern storytelling. He doesn't need a twist. He relies on the rhythm of thought. His sentences wind around themselves like ivy, thick and tangled, occasionally revealing a sharp thorn of truth that draws blood before you can pull away.
Think about the last time you were truly bored. Not the "I have nothing to do" boredom of a child, but the "I am alone with my thoughts and I don't like what they're saying" boredom of an adult. Most of us flee that feeling. we reach for our phones. We turn on the TV. We find a way to drown out the silence.
Shawn pulls up a chair in that silence and asks us to stay a while.
He suggests that our "moth days" are not a waste of time. They are the time. The yearning, the searching, the fumbling toward a light we can’t quite reach—that is the human condition. To "do purgatory right" is to acknowledge that we are all, in some sense, stuck in a lobby. We are all between where we were and where we hope to be.
The Weight of the "Before"
There is a specific kind of grief in the word before. It implies a loss of innocence, a transition into a state where things are heavier, darker, or perhaps just more final.
The play captures the sensory details of a life lived in the periphery. It’s the smell of a specific hallway. The way the light hits a particular piece of fruit. The sound of a voice that you realize, with a jolt of terror, you are starting to forget. These aren't just facts about a character’s life; they are the anchors that keep them from floating away into the void.
When Shawn writes about what we did "before," he is asking us to account for our joy. He is asking if we noticed the world while we were busy waiting for it to begin. It’s a terrifying question because most of us know the answer is "not really." We were too busy checking our watches. We were too busy being moths.
Finding the Human in the Absurd
It is easy to be cynical about experimental theater. It’s easy to dismiss it as an elite exercise in navel-gazing. But Shawn’s work, despite its intellectual pedigree, is deeply vulnerable. It’s the work of a man who is clearly worried about the world, about cruelty, and about the way we lose our humanity in small, incremental steps.
He uses the hypothetical to reach the visceral. By creating a world that feels slightly "off," he allows us to see our own world more clearly. It’s like looking at a star—sometimes you can see it better if you look just to the side of it.
The characters in his purgatory aren't monsters. They are people who are trying to be good, or at least trying to explain why they weren't better. They are us on our best days and our most cowardly nights. They are the versions of ourselves we see in the bathroom mirror at 3:00 AM when the light is unflattering and the house is too quiet.
We live in an era of "answers." We have apps that tell us where to eat, who to date, and how to think. We are obsessed with optimization. Shawn offers the opposite. He offers the unoptimized life. He offers the beauty of the tangent, the necessity of the doubt, and the dignity of the wait.
The moth is a perfect metaphor because its flight is erratic. It doesn't fly in a straight line. It zig-zags. It loops. It seems lost. But it is always moving toward something it perceives as brilliance.
Perhaps the tragedy isn't that the moth never reaches the light. Perhaps the tragedy is that we think the goal was the light all along, rather than the magnificent, chaotic, terrifying dance in the dark.
Wallace Shawn invites us to stop looking at the bulb and start looking at each other in the shadows. He reminds us that even in purgatory—especially in purgatory—there is a strange, desperate kind of grace in simply staying in the room.
The lobby is crowded. The magazines are still old. The air is still stale. But as the lights dim and the hummingbird voice begins to speak, you realize you aren't waiting for the door to open anymore. You are already exactly where you need to be.
