Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory version of Ibsen play to become a Demme film

Since about 1998, two old friends, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn ’65, and writer, actor, and director André Gregory ’56, have worked intermittently on a new translation and revision of the play The Master Builder by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). There have been much collaborative work and many rehearsals over the years, but no bona fide productions. The New York Times now reports that film director Jonathan Demme, the Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs, has agreed to direct a motion picture of the reimagined Master Builder. Shawn and Gregory co-starred in the 1981 film My Dinner with André. Gregory, who has a long track record in avant-garde theater, voices some of his aesthetic philosophy in the recent Harvard Magazine feature, “The Future of Theater.”