My Dinner with André: A Screenplay

My Dinner with Andre is a passionate, volatile, and humorous encounter between two friends who have not seen each other for a long time, and decide to catch up on each others' lives over dinner. Andre Gregory is an intense, highly experimental theater director and playwright in search of life's meanings and spiritual revelations. His friend, Wally Shawn, is an actor and playwright living in New York who is more preoccupied with the search for his next meal. As Andre recounts his global journeys involving esoteric theatrical experiments and mystical adventures, Wally listens with more than skepticism, as his attitudes shift among wonder, puzzlement, admiration, and anger. What finally emerges is a sensitive portrait of a friendship that survives and transcends contransting assumptions about love, death, art, and man's continuing quest for self-fulfillment.

Benedict Nightingale

A tussle between romance and realism, imagination and sense, spirit and body....An enjoyable elaborated argument between an articulate Don Quixote and a humorous Sancho Panza, and, perhaps, a demonstration that both are necessary to the rest of us. -- New Statesman

Wallace Shawn is the author of "Our Late Night" (OBIE Award Best Play) "Marie and Bruce", "Aunt Dan and Lemon", "The Designated Mourner", "The Fever", among other plays, and the screenplay for "My Dinner with André". He has translated and adapted "The Threepenny Opera", "The Master Builder" and "The Mandrake".