My Dinner with Andre
It was obvious that something terrible had happened to Andre, and the whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous. I mean, I really wasn't up for this sort of thing. I had problems of my own.
My Dinner with Andre (1980) by Wallace Shawn (with Andre Gregory)
In this filmed conversation between Shawn and Andre Gregory—the radical director who has staged many of his plays—"Wally" discusses his attempts to find a comfortable niche as a writer and actor, while Andre tries to make sense of a recent journey that combined theatrical experimentation, esoteric rituals, and nervous breakdown.
Notes
For those who are familiar with Shawn's later work with its focus on the corruption of modern society and intolerability of middle-class existence, it may be startling to revisit My Dinner with Andre and see Wally taking the side of "ordinary life" and simple pleasures, versus Andre's wild-eyed mysticism; at times, they sound like two of the opposing voices in The Fever. Most of the movie's original audience didn't know the plays, so the shock was rather that of seeing that funny-looking little guy from Manhattan and Taxi hashing out the meaning of life with a best friend who once had himself buried alive.
Though the movie is sometimes dismissed as "two intellectuals chatting," the stakes were high for those involved. Shawn, according to his preface to the script, saw his approach to writing thus far (he had just written Marie and Bruce) as reaching a dead end, and wanted to engage the outer world more: "I had generously shown on the stage my interior life as a raging beast ... I knew—I knew—that beneath my work's primeval, hysterical facade there was a calm little writer in an armchair just waiting to burst forth." Meanwhile his friend and mentor, who had helped him start in theater, had come to see theater as pointless and the outer world as possibly beyond repair. What could they tell each other? (Gregory described this as less of an experiment and more of an urgent challenge: "[Wally] came over to see me and said that he felt that either I had had a complete nervous breakdown over the last few years, or else a creative block, or a spiritual awakening, or a combination of all three, but whatever it was, when he reached my age ... he didn't want to go through the same thing.") The next play Shawn wrote after Dinner, Aunt Dan and Lemon, could be seen as a partial resolution of his dilemma, bringing his disturbing psychology together with more tangible characters and explicit political concerns.
The personal history related by Shawn and Gregory is their own, but it's not a documentary: the conversation was scripted based on recordings of many improvised conversations, and performed on stage for a small audience in New York and a larger one in London before Louis Malle agreed to film it. (Shawn had previously acted in Malle's Atlantic City, and Malle later worked with both of them in Vanya on 42nd Street.) The "restaurant" in the movie was a set built in the ballroom of the (then abandoned) Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia.