David Greenspan plays four millennial playwrights, all women, in I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan by Mona Pirnot at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2.
Mona Pirnot’s new play, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, concerns the hardscrabble existence of aspiring playwrights and the passion that keeps them writing for an industry in which, as playwright Robert Anderson ostensibly said, it’s possible to make a killing but never a living. David Greenspan is the very model of a theater artist who has persevered despite dire fiscal odds. Greenspan is pretty well-known Off-Broadway and, especially, Off-Off Broadway, but he’s certainly not a household name.
Greenspan is justly admired for the wildly energetic physicality of his performances in one-actor works. Photographs by Ahron R. Foster.
Born on a date in 1956 that’s difficult to ascertain (despite the resources of the Internet), Greenspan is now or soon-to-be 69. He’s an actor with compelling stage presence and ample technique. Often the technique is downright astonishing, though not self-consciously so, and it’s never obtrusive. He’s simply one of the most accomplished actors appearing regularly on New York stages.
While Greenspan is known to work with other actors, he’s most noted for solo pieces, some of which he writes himself and some based on existing, often recherché, texts. As a soloist, he has performed Gertrude Stein’s libretto of Four Saints in Three Acts (without the Virgil Thomson music), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (which he adapted from Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize novel), and The Argument (his one-act play based on Aristotle’s Poetics and a gloss by classicist Gerald F. Else). In 2017, Greenspan kept audiences riveted for five-hour performances in which he played all 11 characters in an uncut presentation of Eugene O’Neill’s nine-act Freudian epic Strange Interlude.
At the beginning of her script, Pirnot states, “This play is written to be performed as a solo. All characters are written to be played by David Greenspan.” It’s an idiosyncratic demand and one that doesn’t bode well for the play’s life after its initial production. The five characters of I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan are millennial playwrights (one an off-stage figure), and all women. After playing the gloomy neurotics of Strange Interlude with aplomb, Greenspan ought to find Pirnot’s comedic dramatists a snap.
Pirnot’s narrator, who’s named Mona, describes her circumstances as an emerging playwright: “I’m waiting for a check for 3,150 dollars. There’s a play that took me eight years to write and a theater has licensed it for production and I’ll be getting a check for 3,150 dollars. That’s with my agent’s 10% taken out. And that’s for the entire run. And to be clear, for a theater of that size, that’s a standard rate.”
Mona (the play’s narrator, as opposed to Mona, the play’s author) has concluded that “making a living making plays is as rare as winning the lottery.” After seeing Greenspan perform all the roles in Barry Conners’s 1925 comedy The Patsy, however, she has become a Greenspan admirer—arguably, an obsessive fan—and her enthusiasm for playwriting has been rejuvenated.
“You should have seen him do it,” Mona tells her friends Emmy (who is having no luck in her career) and Sierra (who has abandoned playwriting for the writers’ room of a cable television series). “It was the most affirming theater I had seen in years,” Mona declares, and reason enough to “stay in the cult or the pyramid scheme” of playwriting, despite the poverty, insecurity, and certainty that her circumstances aren’t going to improve.
Greenspan brings impishness and vocal versatility to his quicksilver changes from one role to another.
Mona confides in Emmy and Sierra that she’s writing a play—27 pages so far—for Greenspan to perform, despite not being acquainted with him or having any reason to believe he’ll be interested.
Sierra: So you’re going to spend all this time and energy writing a play that might never be done?
Mona: I think you just described the process of writing any play.
I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan is a nifty vehicle for this treasure of Off-Off-Broadway and an opportunity to savor a comedic turn from a solo artist more commonly associated with serious material. Not that Greenspan is a stranger to humor—besides The Patsy, he was in the 2009 Broadway revival of The Royal Family and, earlier in that decade, understudied Harvey Fierstein and Dick Latessa in the original production of Hairspray.
Greenspan is a physical dynamo, capable of filling the stage with the energy of a whole cast of characters. That may explains scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado’s decision to keep the stage free of clutter, evoking Emmy’s minuscule Brooklyn apartment (the kind of urban dwelling a playwright might afford, if only barely). In such an environment, Greenspan is free to jump, gesture wildly, and swing from one character to another without interference.
The Atlantic Theatre’s presentation of I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan plays through April 30 at Atlantic Stage 2 (330 W. 16th St.). Evening performances are 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees are 2 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. For tickets and information, call (646) 452-2220 or visit atlantictheater.org.
Playwright: Mona Pirnot
Direction: Ken Rus Schmoll
Sets & Costumes: Arnulfo Maldonado
Lighting: Yuki Nakase Link
