My Dinner With André

Play (2024)
Based on the film (1981) by Wallace Shawn and André Gregory
Adapted and Developed by Jonathan Fielding and Robert Knopf
Harbor Stage Company
Boston Center for the Arts
South End, Boston
March 13 – March 30, 2025

With Jonathan Fielding (Wally), Robert Knopf (André), Robin Bloodworth (Waiter)

Scenic design: Evan Farley

When the film on which this play is based arrived in 1981 it was quite revolutionary in its insistence on pure and unremitting conversation. Without the usual additions of cinematic shaping and technique, its almost two hours of talk seemed barely impossible to tolerate until, lo and behold, it became an unexpected hit, an example of courage and boundary-breaking in film technique, and a long-preserved icon of independent filmmaking. All of a sudden its wordiness became a thing, an emblem of something entirely new and interesting.

Indeed the film is long-winded, and charmingly so. But, in this production, Jonathan Fielding (Wally) and Robert Knopf (André), both of them the adaptors of the show and the actors in it, have chosen to make a few cuts here and there, so that the runtime is about an hour and a half rather than an hour and fifty minutes. It is perfectly digestible and appealing in the slightly pared down form and the slight abbreviations are barely noticeable.

One would naturally ask Why Do This? And the only plausible answer comes from actually experiencing the result, which is not only pleasurable but penetrating and signficant. In the film, one certainly gets a sense of the intimacy of the connection between Wally and André, but here, in the staged version, one also gets a sense of the vulnerable moment, the texture of the encounter itself, which is what, actually, live theater is all about. One senses not only the classic give and take of the ideas put forth mostly by André, but then also by Wally, but also a sense of the palpable emotional connection between the two characters.

It’s quite a trick for both actors here to embody their film analogues without satire or caricature, and they do so admirably. Wally, in particular, is a character who could easily be parodied, but, here, Jonathan Fielding offers a muted but convincing portrayal that emphasizes the hesitant engagement that Wally brings to the encounter without playing up what one might see as Wallace Shawn’s more clown-like aspects. And Fielding’s rendition is, if one pays careful attention, slightly different in demeanor from Wallace Shawn’s. Where Shawn, in the film, shows a considerable amount of curiosity, even from the beginning, about Gregory’s various experiential exploits, Fielding holds back a little more, emphasizing Wally’s caution and distance from Gregory’s outpouring. It’s an interesting strategy, and leads to a slightly more subtle sense of humorous distance from André’s unrestrained account of his own endeavors, and which makes the eventual growth of connection between them more vivid.

Similarly, Robert Knopf’s André is a somewhat muted, but appealing, character who exudes a daring authenticity without seeming histrionic. In the film, André Gregory also manages to do this, which is in itself a trick, but here, without duplicating André Gregory’s exact kinds of gestures and intonations, Knopf conveys the genuine sense of discovery that the character exhibits through his long account of the offbeat and extraordinary ways he has pursued his life and his art since last seeing Wally.

From a mundane perspective, this duplication of a filmscript on stage is a little bit like cinematic karaoke, since many of the audience will know the lines already and will know them well. Or, in an even more superficial way, one might see this effort at imitation of a familiar film a bit like those of the audiences who would attend the The Rocky Horror Picture Show for which, at frequently repeated showings, audiences who knew the script so well reveled in mimicking it and acting along with it,

Yet, that is not what is going on here. The subtlety and immediacy of this production and its performances gives this form of duplication of a well-known film a framed dimensionality which lends its subject an aesthetic grandeur and a demand for appreciation that is both unexpected and well-deserved. It represents an artistic gesture that honors and in many ways rises above its cinematic source in tenderness and expressiveness. Indeed, there is some true aesthetic benefit in hearing these interchanges in this new dramatic guise and context.

It is, in fact, the immediacy of the encounter exhibited in this live performance that underlines the important existential content of the film, which the film, as film, can suggest and to some extent convey, but which is limited by the innate distancing reinforced by the permanence of performance in film itself. Though film can indeed be very much alive in many ways, because it does freeze its action into an existing form, it cannot quite reach out, in the moment, to the life it exhibits. But theater can do that, and that is exactly what this performance attempts to do and succeeds at doing.

The film My Dinner with André shows how the texture of relationship develops in pure dialogue, and demonstrates not only how this is at the heart of cinematic art, but, since much of its talk is about theater, also of theatrical art. Indeed it is a film about theater, and turning it into a theater piece about theater, with a sense of the film as the vehicle in between, is a highly interesting and artistically creative gesture.

One comes away, after seeing this theatrical piece based on a film about theater people who are talking about theatrical pieces that challenge conventional notions about theater, with a warm and evocative sense of human connection. Wally initially represents the hesitant recipient of André’s strange discourse, but one who, especially in this theatrical adaptation of the film, comes to be struck by his own coming into subtle revelation about the nature of relationship, the task of opening up emotionally, and how this is at the heart of what theater is about.

Of course, some of the humorous contrasts between the two characters remain. After hearing André’s account of various extreme exploits with a group of theatrical explorers in France, Wally’s line about down-to-earth satisfactions and thrilling to find a morning cup of coffee still drinkable without bugs in it still reverberates with great fun. But, as well, there is a sense of capturing, in these moment of their alternative revelations of disposition, lifestyle and demeanor, a coming together of two friends and colleagues, a sharing not only of a physical meal but of an emotional one in which their lives and perspectives touch upon one another with tenderness as well as contrast.

Though, in so many ways, the film is intentionally small and limited in scope, its implications are large, for it demonstrates what, in feeling and connection, attenuated discourse can signify. This play, though a modest adaptation of the film in alteration of dialogue, has equally large implications in showing, viscerally and immediately, the feeling and connection between these characters in the here and now, highlighting the potency of the kind of vivid and honest theater to which the film points.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)