Review: David Greenspan Stars in a Metatheatrical Hall of Mirrors Bearing His Own Name

There are only two design credits in the program for I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan: set and costume designer Arnulfo Maldonado and lighting designer Yuki Nakase Link. Not that their work is negligible. Maldonado furnishes an otherwise bare stage with a couch and white screens, and Link deploys lighting cues to suggest moments when the drama moves to a different setting. But they’re ultimately subservient to David Greenspan, the performer of the title, who can create whole physical and emotional worlds through his voice and body alone. As a tribute to one of New York City theater’s shining lights, it is a highly eccentric one, to put it mildly.

The conceptual oddity of this enterprise isn’t entirely surprising given its creator. Playwright Mona Pirnot’s previous show in NYC, I Love You So Much I Could Die, featured Pirnot herself onstage using a speech-to-text program to recount a harrowing personal story, one broken up occasionally by songs she performed with a guitar, all of this done with her back to the audience. However you reacted to the experience as a whole, there was no denying the boldness of its desire to challenge conventions of audience engagement.

She has taken that experimental zeal a couple steps further in David Greenspan. Not only is the chameleonic actor performing an entire four-character drama all by himself, complete with recited stage directions, but the drama itself revolves around a day in Brooklyn in the summer of 2022 in which Mona and a few writer friends are gathered for a reading of a play written by one of them. Mona even explains in the play-within-the-play that she’s currently working on a play for David Greenspan, written in his style, about how much she loves his work.

With one character ranting about the continued prominence of Shakespeare and another tossing off a joke about how a play partly about a scientific subject might easily get a Sloan Foundation grant, the play’s sense of in-crowd insularity may inspire either delight, irritation, or both. Pirnot’s metatheatrical hall of mirrors does have a larger purpose, though. “I’ve been thinking about playwrights,” Greenspan-as-Pirnot says right off the bat. Specifically, she’s thinking about the difficulty of making a living solely as a playwright, especially as her friend Emmy is contemplating leaving the field altogether, following the lead of mutual friend Sierra, who currently works in the more lucrative field of television writing.

This leads to an even more difficult reckoning, as Sierra forces Mona to confront the possibility that, because she’s financially supported by her more famous playwright partner, she’s free to talk about high artistic ideals in ways others aren’t. In real life, Pirnot is married to Doll’s House, Part 2 and Dana H. scribe Lucas Hnath.

One could applaud Pirnot’s willingness to acknowledge her privilege as bracing self-criticism. Just because you are willing to call out your own solipsism, though, doesn’t automatically inure you from criticism of being too solipsistic. But that’s where David Greenspan himself comes in. Because it’s that added layer of artifice in seeing Greenspan interpret her fictionalized yet deeply personal experiences that suggests a desire on her part to consider these thematic obsessions from a more detached perspective—theoretically, at least.

Greenspan is, as ever, simply electrifying to watch. As directed by frequent collaborator Ken Rus Schmoll, he switches between roles with astonishing dexterity. He moves across the stage with panther-like grace yet manages to effortlessly delineate characters with one slip of the vocal register and one change in gesture.

It’s also touching to see Greenspan-as-Pirnot recount the theatrical encounter that turned the playwright into a Greenspan fan, the 2022 remount of his solo performance of Barry Conners’s 1925 comedy The Patsy, without a trace of vanity and instead with a commitment to capturing the pure transformative emotion of the moment.

Whether Greenspan’s formidable skill and enthusiastic participation is enough to transcend the playwright’s own cleverly wrought navel-gazing, however, is more questionable. For me, both David Greenspan and I Love You So Much I Could Die expose the limits of that age-old artistic maxim of “Write what you know,” especially when they inspire the indifferent reaction of “so what?”