The Lesson of David Greenspan

Jason Fitzgerald

BOOKS REVIEWED: David Greenspan, Four Plays and a Monologue. SouthGate: NoPassport Press, 2011; David Greenspan, The Myopia and Other Plays, edited by Marc Robinson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.

avid Greenspan has been writ- The event also brings disappointment, ing, directing, and performing though not for the quality of the volumes, Don New York’s stages for nearly which are thorough and impressively thirty years, since he began delivering designed, but rather because reading original monologues and writing text Greenspan in print means encountering for dancers in the early 1980s. Since his plays without the embodied presence then, many American playwrights who of their author. Perhaps apprehension are Greenspan’s contemporaries or is a better word than disappointment, younger have seen their major works then, since for now these collections will disseminated in published collections serve as reminders of happy evenings and single-play monographs. A num- for Greenspan’s many fans. Few would ber of those, such as Wallace Shawn, call Greenspan a performance artist, Richard Maxwell, and Young Jean Lee, but his inimitable style is as integral to have also, like Greenspan, participated his dramatic worlds as Spalding Gray’s in the ongoing struggle to bridge the or Jack Smith’s were to theirs. On the gap between off-Broadway’s traditional occasion of these publications, then, it is page-to-stage production process and worth reflecting on precisely that which that of the auteur and ensemble-driven a printed script shutters, the connection worlds that surround it (characterized, in of the playwright to his play. the years when Greenspan first started working, by Richard Foreman, Robert The editors of the University of Michigan Wilson, and the Wooster Group). To collection attempt to compensate for finally see not one but two anthologies this loss by placing, on their cover, an of plays by Greenspan, a crucial figure in image of Greenspan so close and vivid the development of a post-70s dramatic you want to tug him until he enters your aesthetic, is therefore all the more excit- living room. This Greenspan is not only ing for their late arrival. captivating; he’s light as a bird’s wing.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_r_00132 by guest on 23 September 2021 Caught mid-gesture, his head bowed also by working his revision processes and his thumb gently brushing his chin, into his dramaturgies. “She’s a treat,” he seems poised to flutter away, ready to one character describes another in She abandon his own book to a dull white Stoops to Comedy, “I mean a threat — it’s background — and his readers to a series a typo.” “Clearly,” says Dionysus’s slave of theatricalist fun-houses that are both in Old Comedy, Greenspan’s adaptation maddening and delicious. of The Frogs, “we’re not using Jeffrey Henderson’s brilliant rendering in the Among them is a play in which a man Loeb translation.” Plots, characters, set- plays his mother so his brother will tings, and rhetoric are continually and impress his mother-in-law in return for casually mutable, and alternatives to his brother having played him to seduce the playwright’s choices never disappear his wife (Dead Mother). In another play, from view. a pair of actors portray characters who break character to play actors in a play But the fun of such fluidity should not be by an author like the author of the play presumed. There’s terror in not knowing the audience is watching (The HOME where things stand, or how they’ll end Show Pieces). There is a play in which a up. Jack, the earliest play in either col- man plays a woman who plays a man lection, makes of the absence of its title who plays Orlando in As You Like It to character a mourning ritual for every win back his/her girlfriend, all without anonymous man who has died of AIDS. a single costume change (She Stoops to Writer’s block is a frequent theme in the Comedy). There is a play in which the other work, as frustrated writers, often biblical Bathsheba voices the sexual sitting on their toilets (an ode to Joyce’s fantasies of a man supposedly writing Ulysses) or masturbating to avoid their a play about her (2 Samuel 11, Etc.). failures, refuse to make the decisions that And in The Myopia, Greenspan’s solo will stabilize their fictional worlds. Other performance masterpiece, a sentient, characters require constant reassurances English-speaking orb shatters as he that the ground shifting beneath their tries to complete an unfinished musical feet is no cause for alarm. “Let’s just about Warren G. Harding written by his pretend the plot works,” as one character late father, who is killed when his wife suggests in Dead Mother, may be the turns into a giant and squashes him for golden rule in Greenspan’s narratives. having an affair — or so Carol Channing Or else, as Dionysus explains in self- tells us during intermission. defense after his own plot leads him to despair, “A play, someone just starts Greenspan’s plays are not obscure like writing it to be funny and doesn’t know Foreman’s or Wilson’s, nor dizzying what he’s getting at yet and doesn’t want conglomerations of high and pop cul- to go back to the beginning and change ture like Reza Abdoh’s or The Wooster the whole darn thing to make it add up.” Group’s. These dramas’ narratives Failure, then, is the price of completion, and characters are comprehensible and not everyone can handle the loss of but in unceasing ontological motion. perfection. One of my favorite Greens- Greenspan pushes the boundaries of pan notations, removed from the pub- theatrical artifice not only by having lished version of Old Comedy, replaces actors play ever-shifting characters but

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_r_00132 by guest on 23 September 2021 the more familiar “End of Play” with unhappiness. Even Barclay, who makes the breathless, relieved “End (Made It).” no progress on his magnum opus, nonetheless offers quite the spectacle with his Greenspan’s oeuvre is littered with the squirming self-loathing, “chew[ing] the corpses of those who don’t make it. scenery” until, like an overeager vaude- Bathsheba finds no place in the play the villian, he “gets the hook.” writer ultimately concocts in 2 Samuel 11, Etc., while Dionysus is dethroned by his The myopia, then, is the failure to see life, slave at the end of Old Comedy. A suicide in all its theatrical get-ups, while you’re launches the plot of Dead Mother, and busy making plans. In an interview She Stoops to Comedy is darkened by published in the University of Michigan the chronically depressed Simon, who volume, Greenspan says that most of his can’t find a happy ending to save his plays “are comic by nature,” by which he life — “Who needs another play about intends the “classical definition of com- him?” he asks, over and over again. Only edy — the release from misery.” He later Beauty, an unproduced dramatization of revises this description: “Escape,” he Oscar Wilde’s obscenity trials included decides, “is a better word than ‘release.’” in the NoPassport publication, follows Escape suggests a degree of luck, and a the self-shattering of one of the late degree of drama, that ‘release’ is too soft nineteenth century’s most protean per- to contain. One is thrust into action and formers, whose aristocratic pride crashes makes the most of the consequences, or into his desperate love for Bosie. so Greenspan’s theatre teaches us.

Indeed, the tragic incompatibility And yet Marc Robinson’s introduction to between intention and action is the sub- The Myopia and Other Plays, the stron- ject, structure, and moral of The Myopia. gest and most wide-ranging assessment Its three interlocking plots — Warren G. of Greenspan’s work yet composed, con- Harding’s bumbling rise to the presi- siders the limits of Greenspan’s practice dency, a blocked writer named Febus in of theatricalized flux.“How far can this conflict with his giantess wife Koreen, elastic universe expand without collaps- and their son Barclay, the aforemen- ing?,” Robinson asks, sounding a note of tioned orb — are mirrors of each other, trepidation derived from attention to the as each protagonist struggles to make dark sides of these buoyant dramatur- the life s/he desires. Harding wants to gies. The uneasiness that Greenspan’s be a great man of history, Febus a great characters face is contagious. It is not playwright, Koreen a doted-upon prin- only his characters but also his audiences cess, and Barclay the reconstituted son of who face a world under constant threat a happy household. All are “shattered,” of collapse, filled with absences that literally or figuratively, by their attempts. threaten to swallow them whole. How, But they are each producers in spite of then, are we to avoid Barclay’s fate and themselves. Harding, hardly a savior of learn to take pleasure, and take action, the republic, is nonetheless an agent in amidst ever-unfolding failure? an unflattering stage of the American story. Febus does write his musical, in The question recalls the challenge posed admittedly tattered form, and his mar- by Puck’s final monologue to those riage with Koreen is no less real for its who are “offended” by the “shadows”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_r_00132 by guest on 23 September 2021 and “visions” they have seen before encountering his zaniest and, by sheer them. “Think . . . that you have but body count, most destructive dramatic slumbered here,” he insists, but it’s a coy world, the audience of The Myopia stares assurance. He knows that the love-juice at the one figure who not only survives in Demetrius’s eye is permanent, and but thrives — Greenspan himself. Always that the fairies are no idle dreams in in motion, swooping phantomlike onto the minds of the Athenians. Greenspan the stage at the beginning of each act is the American theatre’s inheritor of and flitting out before the blackouts are Puck’s power to offer delight and a sense complete, his is a spirit never at rest, and of security, despite or even because of never myopically committed to a present his charismatic and bumbling ground- other than the one he occupies. lessness. At the beginning of every performance I’ve ever seen David give, By all accounts, Greenspan had to he struts onto his stage as though it’s re-learn this lesson while crafting The the safest place on earth, smiles to his Myopia. He wrote and rewrote the play audience like a child who’s won a day from 1991 until its 1998 performance in a candy shop, and (I may occasion- at P.S. 122, in a process that must have ally imagine this part) winks, as if to resembled that of poor Barclay, frozen by say, “You’re as excited as I am, right?” his oversized plans and undersized will. Greenspan calls these years his “dark It is in this way that Greenspan is period,” marked by a series of artistic inseparable from his own dramatic failures (Dog in a Dancing School, Son texts. His half-in half-out performance of an Engineer, both absent from these style — his failed illusionism — grounds collections) and, as in the case of Only his productions in a celebration of the- Beauty, lesser achievements that were atrical persistence. Though Greenspan’s never produced. After having been heroes are Beckett, Joyce, and Stein, and playwright-in-residence from 1986–90 lately Shakespeare and the Greeks, it for the now-defunct HOME for Con- is Brecht’s materialist, embodied, and temporary Theatre and Art, where he had dialectical theatre that finds its queer free reign of the theatre’s facilities and culmination on Greenspan’s stage. the loyalty of its producers, Greenspan The “crude thought” or “ plumpes Den- did not take to artistic homelessness. The ken” exonerated by The Messingkauf breakthrough came when he embraced Dialogues — the light ontological touch his play’s epic ambition and reduced its and gentle messiness that comes from cast and mise-en-scene to himself. As forcing one’s philosophy down to he wrote after he first tried this trick, in earth — is a kind of mother’s milk for a restaging of Engineer, “Reciting the Greenspan’s aesthetic. He offers a playful stage directions . . . permitted me [the] survivalism that depends on the uneven opportunity to create in words, worlds combination of his imagination and his and environments and then, in words, body, each providing a safe compass for erase them. It was neat.”1 the other’s revelry. There, in this short, coy assessment This tension is what makes The Myopia of his new discovery, is the demiurgic the most cogent expression of the lesson twinkle that ties all of Greenspan’s work that undergirds his life’s work. While together. It is the sense of committed

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_r_00132 by guest on 23 September 2021 relaxation, which is fundamentally an trude Stein’s “Plays,” and the yet-to-be- artist’s sensibility, that other actors will produced A Horse’s Ass. With any luck, have to unearth if they hope to repro- Greenspan’s future in publishing will duce, after Greenspan’s work wanders be as prolific as his pen. But even if not, beyond its author’s reach, the necessary our modern-day Puck has made clear productive tension to keep it afloat. As that he now feels very much at home. for Greenspan himself, his rate of output In Greenspan’s first play to followThe has been increasingly ferocious since Myopia, 2003’s She Stoops to Comedy, Myopia, though he has only once, with the setting reads, “The stage of course.” Jonas, returned to the solo performance style. These two play collections include NOTES much of the later work but miss the more recent Coraline (with music by Stephen 1. David Greenspan, Son of an Engineer, Introduction (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Merritt), Go Back to Where You Are, a Press, 1995), 6. one-man adaptation of Barry Conners’s The Patsy, Jonas, an adaptation of Ger-

Jason Fitzgerald is a doctoral candidate in Columbia University’s PhD theatre program, a sub-committee of the department of English and comparative literature. He is also a theatre critic for Backstage magazine and a dramaturg at the off-Broadway theatre company The Playwrights Realm. He holds an MFA in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from Yale School of Drama.

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