The Ethics of Minimalism

We Had a World, at the Huntington Theater (Calderwood Pavilion) Photo: Annielly Camargo

A noticeable shift is emerging in contemporary theater and cinema, one that values a stripped-down, elemental storytelling. And for many reasons, it feels less like an aesthetic choice and more like a cultural necessity. Joshua Harmon’s We Had a World (Huntington Theater, Boston) and Wallace Shawn’s What We Did Before Our Moth Days (Greenwich Theater, New York City) are very different plays in temperament and generation, but they share a commitment to spareness, moral exposure and emotional authenticity. That drift also finds an unexpected cinematic parallel in Oliver Laxe’s new film Sirat (in theaters now.) In a moment saturated with noise, spectacle and the ideologically performative, many people like me are craving the opposite experience: direct, authentic, unmitigated.

Harmon’s play centers on a dying grandmother who asks her grandson to write a brutally honest account of their family, reopening decades of conflict, cruelty, and, yes, love. The narrative device is almost disarmingly simple—memory reconstructed through conversation—yet the emotional effect is profound. Rather than theatrical flourishes, Harmon relies on confession, contradiction, and the unstable reliability of recollection. This is not aesthetic purity for its own sake. Instead it becomes a way of forcing proximity. With so few distractions, the audience is placed inside the emotional ambiguities of a family where resentment is intertwined with devotion, tenderness with damage.

Wallace Shawn’s What We Did Before Our Moth Days (directed by his longtime friend and collaborator André Gregory) operates in a different tonal register, but it shares a skeletal architecture. With nothing but four chairs on a stage, the play follows four individuals—husband, wife, son, and the husband’s longtime lover—as they narrate their intertwined emotional lives with philosophical candor. Shawn has always been a dramatist of moral consciousness, but here his theatrical apparatus is deliberately reduced to just language and presence. The characters examine love, remorse, resentment and desire. This stripped approach has much in common with Shawn’s iconic 1981 film My Dinner with André where theatrical experience does not emerge from plot but from attention itself.

Harmon and Shawn both trust that human complexity, spoken plainly, is enough. They resist impulses toward theatrical excess—multimedia overlays, conceptual scaffolding, political messaging systems—and rely instead on one of theater’s oldest forms: people on a stage, talking.

This aesthetic restraint feels particularly resonant at this moment in time. We are living inside an era of amplification—algorithmic outrage, visual overstimulation, ideological polarization—where emotional experience is often mediated before it can even be felt. In such a climate, this reads less as austerity than as refuge. The stripped stage becomes a zone where perception can recalibrate. Nothing is competing for attention except the fragile reality of human connection.

The same impulse drives the film Sirat. While vastly different in scale and setting, Laxe’s film has its own alignment with this approach. A father is searching for his missing daughter, crossing the deserts of Morocco with a group of ravers. What emerges is part road movie, existential meditation, and apocalyptic vision—all best experienced in a theater with a very large screen and an excellent sound system.

What makes Sirat feel spiritually conversant with Harmon and Shawn is not a narrative similarity but its experiential economy. The film strips away explanatory dialogue, conventional emotional cues and narrative reassurances. Sound design alternates between immersive techno intensity and near silence. The vast desert itself becomes a character, one that is a living, breathing presence rather than a prop or backdrop.

In all three works, characters are left with no theatrical machinery or cinematic spectacle to hide behind. There is also a deeper philosophical correspondence: each work grapples with the instability of human intention. Harmon’s family members reinterpret the past in competing ways. Shawn’s characters admit they do not fully understand why they love who they love. Laxe’s travelers move forward through uncertainty toward a destination that may not exist. In each case, narrative becomes less about resolution than about endurance: how human beings continue moving despite confusion, grief, loss and moral ambiguity.

This may be why stripped storytelling feels so appropriate right now. This current cultural moment is defined by profound uncertainty—political, ecological, technological, existential. Grand narratives feel unreliable. Certainty itself often appears performative. Under these conditions, art that acknowledges vulnerability rather than control feels more truthful.

By removing ornament, proportion is restored. Instead of viewing these characters as ideological avatars or dramatic archetypes, we see them as limited and confused human beings who are still trying to navigate love, loss, memory, fear. The spareness also gives permission for us to see our own lives—so full of contradiction, confusion and errors—with greater tenderness and acceptance.

For these directors and writers, minimalism is an ethical stance.

They also share another vitally important quality: they trust their audience. They trust that our attention, freed from distraction, is enough. They trust that presence can still carry meaning, that authenticity does not require spectacle. And in an overstimulated, disintermediated age, that feels radical.

We Had a World runs through March 15.

What We Did Before Our Moth Days runs through May 10.