Review: David Greenspan Returns Off-Broadway to Play a Silent Starlet in On Set With Theda Bara

Actor David Greenspan has been behind some of the most remarkable solo theatrical feats of recent years, including a marathon performance of the entirety of the Eugene O’Neill epic Strange Interlude back in 2017. He’s back with a new one-person show, but unlike Strange Interlude, Gertrude Stein’s libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts, and The Patsy, he isn’t tackling an older play this time. A co-production of Transport Group and Lucille Lortel Theatre, On Set With Theda Bara is a new work by Joey Merlo, and it may well be the oddest material Greenspan has tackled as a solo performer.

The strangeness is apparent in its premise. Theda Bara was a legendary silent film actor from the 1910s and ’20s and one of cinema’s earliest sex symbols. Though most of her films are lost to history, her reputation has managed to survive thanks to photographs and fragments of her films that still exist. Despite its title, however, Merlo’s play isn’t a historical backstage drama. Instead, it’s a contemporary-set surreal Sunset Boulevard-like yarn that imagines Theda Bara as a 138-year-old Norma Desmond-type protagonist, the “vamp” figure she popularized made concrete.

In Merlo’s play, Bara even has a Max von Mayerling-like assistant in the form of a former church organist named Ulysses. Eventually, Iras, a nonbinary teenager obsessed with Bara, enters the star’s orbit after running away from home. A fourth character rounds out this very queer quartet: Detective Finale, Iras’s father, a gay man who irrepressibly searches for her even as he expresses confusion at his daughter’s gender identity.

Greenspan plays all four of these characters — which may be part of the reason why the experience of watching On Set With Theda Bara can be confounding, even alienating at times. Merlo doesn’t offer any performative or staging indications in his script to give us our bearings as to who we’re seeing and where we are at any given moment. Director Jack Serio has generally followed that mysterious spirit, with only Stacey Derosier’s lighting design and a couple ambient cues in Brandon Bulls’s sound design suggesting changes in physical and emotional temperature.

The confusion is possibly the point. Despite Hollywood promoting Bara as having the exotic background of being born in Egypt to a French actor and an Italian sculptor, Bara in reality was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and never stepped foot in Egypt. That fluidity appears to have been Merlo’s jumping-off point for this play, with Iras’s gender confusion offering a modern-day equivalent of Bara’s own lack of firm identity. But the line between a play about confusion and a merely confused play is perilously thin here. One may come away from the play closing in on empty air, especially with an ending that throws much of what we’ve seen in the preceding hour into question.

That, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that the ride itself isn’t worth it, especially with the brilliant Greenspan as our guide. As ever, he throws himself into this half-boiled Gothic stew with wild abandon. Not only does he do his best to sharply define his four characters, but he also leans vigorously into the campiness of the material in ways that one might not have guessed from simply reading Merlo’s script. (Certainly, Merlo doesn’t indicate the delicious way Greenspan pronounces “Google” and “YouTube” when Bara talks about searching for herself on the Internet.) And even though Frank J. Oliva’s scenic design is quite simple — consisting merely of a long table on which audience members sit, with mirrors making up two of the walls — Greenspan moves around the constricted space, including jumping atop the long table, with a freedom that belies its relative claustrophobia.

With Greenspan offering such fireworks, it almost doesn’t matter that the play he’s working with is murky and undigested. Once again, this virtuosic actor shows just how far technique and a palpable love of performing can go in giving us a memorable evening at the theater.