The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan

An Interview with David Greenspan

An Interview with David Greenspan This conversation took place on December 20, 2010, at David Greenspan’s home in New York City. His apartment is a scene of modest personal collections. Numerous small clocks sit on shelves and tables. Handcrafted teapots line the counters and other surfaces. The walls are hung with paintings by his partner, William Kennon—many of them twilight urban landscapes, with smoke and shadow gathered around streetlamps , and yellow signs popping out of the dusk. On a desk, there are copies of Robert Gottlieb’s biography of Sarah Bernhardt (Greenspan was then in rehearsal for Jump, a new piece about Bernhardt’s performance as Tosca); Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo (sources for another work in progress); and J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip. Ackerley, the British memoirist , offers one precedent for the playwright’s own intense animal sympathies . Greenspan is a famous rescuer of abandoned cats; two large-eyed, exceedingly shy adoptees beat a retreat soon after I arrived. Robinson: Perhaps we can begin by talking about your most recent works, those written after the plays collected in this volume. One of them, Go Back to Where You Are, will be presented soon at Playwrights Horizons in New York. Greenspan: Yes. It’s about an actor from ancient Greece named Passalus. He has been festering in Hell for 2,000 years and is sent back to Earth by God to do one good turn. He barters with God, demanding that he be granted one ‹nal wish in exchange for this act: to have his soul obliterated . God agrees. Passalus has the ability to change his shape, so he returns to Earth in disguise. But his involvement with the other characters gets more complicated than he expected . . . he falls in love. Robinson: I read an early version, and was especially interested in an idea that’s voiced a number of times toward the end. Passalus talks about “shifting the balance” among the other characters and thereby freeing them from their own hells “into life again,” as one of them puts it. Can you talk a little bit more about that narrative thread—about that “shift”? Greenspan: I think that most of my plays are comic by nature. Well, they’re often funny. A lot of my plays express what I understand to be a classical de‹nition of comedy—the release from misery. The Myopia, 263 Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, The HOME Show Pieces, this new play—all of them are about people being released from a complex of things that are holding them back. Robinson: What kind of things? Greenspan: Sometimes it’s family. Particularly in my earlier plays it was family. Even in The Myopia there is a release from the trauma of family shenanigans. And that’s also true of Dead Mother and The HOME Show Pieces. She Stoops to Comedy is about a release from self-involvement and imbalance in a partnered relationship. The characters in Go Back to Where You Are are released from a destructive family dynamic, but also from disappointment and bitterness: the bitterness of not achieving what one wanted to achieve, not realizing what one expected to realize—not realizing one’s fantasies. Robinson: Yet even as so many of your characters achieve release, they also reestablish kinship on new terms. I’m thinking obviously of Alexandra and Alison in She Stoops to Comedy but also of the beautiful ending of The HOME Show Pieces where the two men break bread and reaf‹rm their relationship. Many of your plays—certainly four of the ‹ve plays in this volume—seem to study different kinds of intimacy, different kinds of kinship. Sometimes they are nourishing, and sometimes they’re painful, damaging, violent. Greenspan: It’s the more violent ones from which I’ve chosen to write an escape. And actually I think “escape” is a better word than “release” from misery—escape through a resolution of old relationships or old situations that were holding the characters back. Robinson: Your thoughts about comic structure remind me that you openly meditate on genre in many of your plays. In She Stoops to Comedy , Alexandra argues that Beckett’s plays “are comic tragedy not tragic comedy.” Simon excuses a pun by saying it’s “consistent with lighthearted nature of entertainment,” and later, Alexandra says, “that’s how plays work every once in a while.” In Go Back to Where You Are, Passalus cautions us to remember that “even when...