Six-time Obie Award recipient David Greenspan plays all four of the characters in Joey Merlo’s On Set with Theda Bara, leading the audience in a manic search for a missing genderqueer youth and the spirit of the greatest vamp in American film history.
On Set with Theda Bara is a single-actor comedy-drama by Joey Merlo that revolves around the suspicious disappearance of a genderqueer teenager. In this send-up of film noir, Merlo piles mystery upon outlandish mystery, and David Greenspan leads the spectators (limited to 50 a performance) through a 65-minute, mazelike tale that’s at once intriguing and mystifying.
Despite what the title suggests, the protagonist of On Set with Theda Bara is not the silent-film star but Detective Finale, a Boomer-generation gumshoe who combines hardboiled, Humphrey Bogart–like swagger with 2024-level self-assurance in his gay identity. For Finale, the stakes in Merlo’s plot are especially high because Iras, the missing youth, is his much-loved only child.
Greenspan dances in the hazy, eye-appealing environment designed by Frank J. Oliva (scenery) and Stephanie Derosier (lighting).
Iras, who’s 16, has been missing for two weeks, and no reasonable explanation has surfaced. Richie, Iras’s other father (a recovering alcoholic and offstage character), has turned to booze for comfort. Restless and despairing, Finale is “wander[ing] these forgotten streets, littered with needles and cigarette butts, broken beer bottles and urine,” hearing Iras’s voice in the distance (or imagining he does). “There’s a time to be a Detective, and there’s a time to be a father,” Finale declares. This, he decides, is the moment when “you’ve gotta be both.” So off he tears on a manic search for Iras.
Finale learns from one of his child’s friends that, before disappearing, Iras developed an obsessive interest in Theda Bara, a muse of freewheeling sexuality back in a puritanical era of American history. With most of her films lost in a 1937 fire, Bara is known today largely through digitized bits of grainy footage from her silent-film career, which began in 1917 and ran through the 1920s. What she represents to Merlo’s characters is initially obscure, but clues emerge after Finale learns about a village called Baranook, where the screen star once lived. Finale hopes to find Iras there (and perhaps Bara herself, as well).
Bara materializes in Baranook. She’s Greenspan’s most vivid creation, every bit as exotic as one would expect. She’s also computer literate: “Sometimes I go on Google ... and then to YouTube ... And then I type in ‘Theda Bara’ and videos come up. It’s the most marvelous thing!” Studying images of herself, Bara is haunted by the disparity between her screen persona and her actual psychology.
Could Bara still be alive at age 138? A farfetched idea, though playwrights are entitled to make anything they wish happen on stage. More likely, she’s some sort of paranormal manifestation. This screen siren whose name and official biography were fabricated by studio executives holds secrets—or better, insights—about the peril of suppressing one’s true identity and living a fiction. The other three characters need her wisdom, but a séance is required to obtain it. The séance gives the play its extravagant climax.
Greenspan prepares for the séance that leads to the climax of On Set with Theda Bara. Photographs by Emilio Madrid.
In recent years, Greenspan has been acclaimed for solo performances of avant-garde works from distant decades. In 2017, he played all the characters in Eugene O’Neill’s Freudian epic Strange Interlude; in 2022, Gertrude Stein’s inscrutable libretto Four Saints in Three Acts. For On Set with Theda Bara, the six-time Obie recipient is collaborating with a notable team of millennial and Gen Z professionals, including Merlo, director Jack Serio, and the production’s designers.
Merlo wrote this play in 2022, while ill and largely bedridden, during his final semester in the graduate playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Perhaps inspired by the physical and mental state in which the script was composed, the designers have created a hazy environment that evokes the disorderly dreams of a feverish patient. Mirrored walls at each end of the space create the impression that multiple Greenspans are spinning through the production. Frank J. Oliva has filled much of the compact playing area with a long, felt-covered table, and most of the audience sits around it. In addition to figuring in the séance, the table is a dance floor for one of the wilder sequences of Greenspan’s high-energy performance. Stacey Derosier’s eerie lighting design includes a number of surprises but, most important, transports the spectators to a realm of violent spirits.
Greenspan’s quicksilver shifts from character to character divert attention from what’s confusing in the narrative, and his swift, assured delivery of climactic speeches shores up the dilapidated logic of the play’s conclusion. But when the house lights come up, there’s a question in the air: “What the hell just happened?” Textual clarity aside, though, Greenspan’s ravishing performance makes On Set with Theda Bara, in its best moments, a theatrical rocket convulsing with paranormal menace, pathos, and campy mischief.
The Transport Group and Lucille Lortel Theatre’s production of On Set with Theda Bara runs through March 9 at The Brick (579 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn). Performances are at 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday. For tickets and information, visit transportgroup.org or lortel.org.
Playwright: Joey Merlo
Direction: Jack Serio
Sets: Frank J. Oliva
Lighting: Stacey Derosier
Costumes: Avery Reed
