My Dinner with Andre - by Wallace Shawn & Andre Gregory (Paperback)

About the Book

"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.

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"'My Dinner with Andre' is unique . . . it is very funny, and some other things as well. It may be the funniest dialectic since Plato."-Mike Nichols

"Rare and remarkable magic."--International Herald Tribune

"A tussle between romance and realism, imagination and sense, spirit and body...An enjoyably 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."--Benedict Nightingale, New Statesman

About the Author

Wallace Shawn is an Obie-winning playwright and a celebrated stage and screen actor. He was born in 1942 and was the older son of William and Cecile Shawn. He graduated from Harvard in 1965. His first play, Our Late Night won the Obie award. In 2005 he was awarded the The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama--which recognize a master American dramatist in mid-career, whose literary achievements are vividly apparent in the rich and striking language of their work.