In his essay collection Night Thoughts, Wallace Shawn writes that morality can influence our behavior, even determine it, but that “the actual process of decision-making takes place in secrecy; it happens in a private room from which we’re escorted out at the last moment. And even if we know what the right choice is, and we long to make that choice, the balance of forces inside us may compel us to go in the opposite direction.”

What We Did Before Our Moth Days—Shawn’s new three-act play—brings us to the door of four of such private rooms. The opening monologue belongs to a son, Tim, who recalls the afternoon that he heard that his father, Dick, had died. We hear from Tim’s mother, Elle. Then we hear from Dick himself. And finally we hear from Elaine, Dick’s mistress. For the next three hours, each narrates the main courses of their lives, with an emphasis on the forces pulling each together and apart.

Tim has much in common with Wallace Shawn. He sees himself as downwardly mobile and less talented than his father, a successful writer. This rings true: Wallace’s father was William Shawn, the revered mid-twentieth century editor of The New Yorker magazine. William, like the character Dick in Wallace’s play, also carried on a longstanding affair that Wallace only learned of in adulthood.

It’s not the case, however, that Tim is stand-in for Wallace, and Dick for William. As Dick’s fame as a writer grows, he falls into a routine of meeting with his circle of friends for dinner at particular haunts. Going out to dinner may not seem like much of a defining character trait, but Dick spends a good amount of his monologues describing the atmosphere of the restaurants and clubs, their food and his boon companions. It is central to who he is.

This could just as well have been inspired byWallace’s life, who in 1981 made the film My Dinner with Andre, about two intellects discussing life, art and time over dinner at the since closed Upper West Side stalwart, Café des Artistes. Restaurants, especially expensive restaurants, are also a recurrent theme in his essays as the place where the very lucky among us feel at home, Wallace included.

With the shame of his perceived inferiority fermenting at Tim’s core, his character’s outer presentation is defined by the blasé attitude toward his desires, whether it be for a teenage girl, his mother, or for creating works of grotesque sexual art. Aware that his desires and behavior are morally suspect, he offers a few justifications. He sees the grand scheme of evolutionary history as a drama where our main characteristics are mapped out in advance, akin to how that first fish to grow feet and walk the earth could have been none other than that species of fish.

The father, Dick, is troubled by his moral failings, too. Even before the infidelity, he worries about the effect he has on Elle. Does her personality shrink around him? Would she enjoy the company of his new friends? But Elle’s monologues reveal that Dick doesn’t know her as well as he thinks. After his death, she becomes attached to a friend that Dick had thought she wouldn’t be able to relate to.

Elle, the wife and mother, comes closest to a saintly figure. She dresses modestly and spends the best years of her life teaching poor students in a school with a mold-infestation so bad it eventually kills her. Unlike Dick and Tim who meet sudden, premature ends, her final moments are dignified by the presence of grateful students at her bedside. While Dick is out prowling bars and focusing on his career as a writer, Elle reads to Tim. The anguish she suppresses is given vent when she channels Medea by voicing a desire to exact revenge on Dick by murdering their son.

One could see this admission as a humanizing foible to Elle’s selflessness, but Shawn suggests that these compulsions do not discriminate, that they come (in Dick’s words) from the “little devil” inside us, and therefore do not reveal anything about Elle’s moral character. While we may not be privy to what goes on in the private room, it matters that Elle rejects her devil, while Dick yields to his.

Shawn is attentive to the class positions of his characters. Dick and Elle come from nondescript middle-class circumstances. After early years of struggle, they rise into the upper-middle class. The mistress Elaine’s defining feature is her upbringing in dismal poverty and a more tenuous hold on middle class life. Not wanting to give up having her own bathroom, she explains, is one of the main reasons she doesn’t want to commit to more with Dick.

Like Tim, Elaine lives untroubled by conventional morality, and it is with Tim, in the play’s emotional climax, that she shares a bottle of wine and a bond over their shared predicament in the aftermath of Dick’s death.

Wallace Shawn is 82. The director, Shawn’s career-long artistic collaborator André Gregory, is in his nineties. The play’s title comes from Dick’s vision of what the end of one’s life is like, announced and accompanied by a swarm of moths. But its effect is not as morbid as it sounds. The line about the moths carrying us off is more matter of fact: ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust. There’s even a suggestion of hopefulness, as the moths appear as a source of light. However it is interpreted, the moths will come for us all. Shawn wants us to keep this in mind, but he implores us to stay focused on the present and to look at what we are doing now.

What We Did Before Our Moth Days is playing at the Greenwich House Theater through May 24.