Why Is Everyone Coughing at “What We Did Before Our Moth Days”?
Hope Davis, Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, and John Early in What We Did Before Our Moth Days. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
“I guess I sort of pictured that when people died, they were sort of gently and vaguely and flutteringly escorted into death by a flock of blind moths,” says Dick (Josh Hamilton), the patriarch who holds court in the new Wallace Shawn play What We Did Before Our Moth Days, directed by longtime collaborator André Gregory. It is a three-hour trip through the annals of grief, love, family, betrayal, relationships, sorrow, death, and sex. And, having seen it several times, I can also say that it will make the audience cough.
Dick is a successful writer whose idyllic marriage to public school teacher Elle (Maria Dizzia) is disrupted by his long-time affair with Elaine (Hope Davis). Their son Tim (John Early) opens the play with a somewhat off-kilter story, subtly signaling to us that there might be something strange about him, a perversion of some kind. We are swiftly ushered into their world and understand that at least one of the characters is speaking to us from the dead.
Composed almost entirely of monologues, it is also very funny, with Shawn’s distinctive language and cadence. There is a mischievousness in his dialogue that is at once jarring and delightful. We enter a purgatory, lifted out of the world entirely. But, every so often, I noticed something that would snap me back to reality: the audience had a coughing problem. A fidgeting problem, too. Greenwich House Theater, where the play is running through May 24, is an intimate space. But I don’t recall ever being at a show in which the audience seems to need to make themselves heard so much.
I should note that the first performance I went to was at the beginning of February, and the last at the beginning of March. These are notoriously peak-coughing months. But I think there is more going on. During my final visit, I began tracking coughs. I felt a little insane doing this, but I was curious about whether a theme might emerge. Many of the coughs were, frankly, fake. We all know a fake cougher when we hear one. I am confident that these fake coughers are reacting to subconscious material elicited from the subjects in the play.
A quick search told me that the phenomenon of incessant coughing is predominant at classical music concerts, less so in the theater. The reason, researchers say, is that audiences fear they must sit still for an extended period. This tracks, but I was sure there was some deeper reason for all the coughing, or maybe I just wanted there to be. Then I had a vague memory of reading about the word “uncanny” and Sigmund Freud. Indeed, Freud wrote an essay entitled “The Uncanny” in 1919. The coughing phenomenon began to make more sense.
“Uncanny” is defined as something strange and mysterious, perhaps unsettling. Freud’s essay on the subject adds a new dimension to it: “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” The concept comes from somewhat confusing German etymology. The word heimlich means “homelike” or “familiar,” but it has a secondary meaning of “hidden” or “kept out of sight.” Unheimlich is the opposite of heimlich, meaning that which should have remained hidden and secret, but eventually comes to light. He writes: “It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition.”
“The cough, I’d argue, is the body’s way of managing the uncanny sensation, a small, socially acceptable convulsion in response to something that has jabbed the id.”
The uncanny, then, is what we feel when something we’ve repressed suddenly surfaces, especially in a context that half-reminds us of a childhood fear or the helplessness of a dream. He says: “Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.” It is a fear lodged in the unconscious, often prompted by something we witness in art and literature. One example Freud gives is the fear of being buried alive; another is the very German children’s story of the Sandman, a character who tears out the eyes of children who won’t go to sleep (he relates this to a fear of castration, because he’s Freud).
And although this play doesn’t recount anything as gruesome as live burial or tearing out underage eyes, it does present us with taboo subjects and forces us to engage with the shadowy imprint of a family’s legacy. Dick’s affair and emotional absence, Elaine’s misanthropy and candor, Tim’s snarled sexuality and his conviction that he’s “sleazy,” Elle’s devastation, ordinary and tragic. None of it is hidden from us; the characters speak freely in the safety of death. It is laid directly in our laps, with no choice but to look straight at it.
The cough, I’d argue, is the body’s way of managing the uncanny sensation, a small, socially acceptable convulsion in response to something that has jabbed the id. It may also have something to do with our ever-dwindling attention spans and social contagion, but I’d prefer to stick with Freud.
The coughs came at moments that were shocking, tender, and honest about life, love, and the damage that can be wrought by those we love most. The staging invites psychic participation: the characters sit in armchairs facing us and confess the most intimate details of their lives while the house lights stay up. At times, we are put in the position of psychotherapist; at others, we are metaphoricallyin the priest’s confessional; and, then, simply fellow souls in the Bardo for the characters to tell us the details of their lives.
The first coughers declared themselves known in the opening monologue from Tim, who recounts hearing the news of his dad’s death midway through a sexual experience with a prostitute. That this happens so early on in the play must come as a real shock to some, who perhaps didn’t know what they were signing up for from such venerated artists as Wallace Shawn and André Gregory.
Then comes Dick, who describes his death in great detail. At one point in the play, he says, “I mean people said, ‘Oh, what a shame, he died young,’ but on the other hand my death was not a terrible thing. My death was not awful. My death could not even be described as one of the worst moments of my life,” which is likely true for so many of the dead. More coughs emerged from the audience. A phone dropped to the floor. Someone knocked over a plastic cup.
Maria Dizzia plays Elle, betrayed matriarch and avid reader. Upon finding out that her husband has a mistress, she lets out a shriek that is somehow also deeply guttural: “And the thing I couldn’t bear, the unspeakable thing, was that I became so nervous that I couldn’t read. I lost the ability to sit on my couch and read a book. I just couldn’t do it, and that was the most terrible thing for me.” Her monologues largely center on love: “But eventually, slowly, bit by bit, the love I’d felt for Dick began to leak out of me. It just started quietly dripping away, until it was all gone,” she says, and we picture her emptied, scooped out entirely of the devotion she had for Dick.
Later, she admits, “And I remember saying to him also, ‘You don’t think I have what it takes to kill our child, but I do. To hurt you, I would kill our child, and I could definitely do it,’” in response to the carnage Dick bestowed on his family, which we know at this point has profoundly impacted his son. If he were willing to destroy the familial bond they had, she would be willing to do it in the literal sense. Even the mention of filicide has to be one of the worst sins a woman can admit to, usually relegated to a Greek tragedy. More coughing, naturally.
Elaine too, played by Hope Davis, prompts the uncanny in the details of her character alone. She is the author of “extremely unpleasant — even grotesque” murder mysteries, which prompted in me the memory of a dark fairytale, Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, and The Twilight Zone, all full of examples of the uncanny. And both of which scared the living daylights out of me as a child. She, too, bucks the usual expectation of a female affability: “And I’d never been the sort of person about whom people would say, ‘You can always count on her in an emergency’”; nor is she the pining caretaker mistress.
Then, on opening night, John Early was overcome with his own paroxysm of coughing mid-scene, choking on his prop wine. It was, dare I say it, uncanny. Strangely, I had spoken briefly with Early about this perplexing coughing issue after a preview, so I was surprised and amused to witness his involuntary outburst. His fit occurred during one of the rare moments when the characters acknowledge one another, as Tim meets with Elaine and discovers hidden details about his father he had never been privy to. Early gallantly got through the scene through breathless coughs as his castmate poured more fake wine to quell them.
What it means for Early as the actor who embodies Tim each night and his id is still unclear. Tim is depraved and chilling, yet still longs for love — and, in this scene, we see how much was hidden from him. The truth of his father spills out, and he realizes he did not know him at all. Perhaps it meant nothing, or perhaps he was psychically engaging with the audience; his reaction to the uncanny at play here was to join them.
Toward the end of the play, Tim says: “The creature that we are wasn’t made by anyone, and if you were to look at it closely as if it were something designed, as you would look at it for example if you were a teacher in a school of design, you’d have to say, ‘Oh no, this is terrible, this is an appalling, dreadful design,’ because the creature that we are is so full of characteristics that only a totally demented designer or a demonically evil designer would have dreamed of including in it, and one of the worst of these is the creature’s ability to be hurt, to be miserable, to be in agony — an ability that, given the environment the creature lives in, is almost inevitably called into play to one degree or another by the normal daily operation and interaction of some of its other characteristics.”
The audience concurs — we are forever in concert with our imperfections, our humanness. The play ends, and the audience is drawn back down to earth, ushered out of the limbo, and the strange, nondescript world of this family of ghosts. A cough here, and a cough there. Someone clears their throat. Someone shifts in their seat. I am compelled to silently forgive the coughers.