The Lesson of David Greenspan

David Greenspan has been writing, directing, and performing on New York’s stages for nearly thirty years, since he began delivering original monologues and writing text for dancers in the early 1980s. Since then, many American playwrights who are Greenspan’s contemporaries or younger have seen their major works disseminated in published collections and single-play monographs. A number of those, such as Wallace Shawn, Richard Maxwell, and Young Jean Lee, have also, like Greenspan, participated in the ongoing struggle to bridge the gap between off-Broadway’s traditional page-to-stage production process and that of the auteur and ensemble-driven worlds that surround it (characterized, in the years when Greenspan first started working, by Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and the Wooster Group). To finally see not one but two anthologies of plays by Greenspan, a crucial figure in the development of a post-70s dramatic aesthetic, is therefore all the more exciting for their late arrival.

The event also brings disappointment, though not for the quality of the volumes, which are thorough and impressively designed, but rather because reading Greenspan in print means encountering his plays without the embodied presence of their author. Perhaps apprehension is a better word than disappointment, then, since for now these collections will serve as reminders of happy evenings for Greenspan’s many fans. Few would call Greenspan a performance artist, but his inimitable style is as integral to his dramatic worlds as Spalding Gray’s or Jack Smith’s were to theirs. On the occasion of these publications, then, it is worth reflecting on precisely that which a printed script shutters, the connection of the playwright to his play.

The editors of the University of Michigan collection attempt to compensate for this loss by placing, on their cover, an image of Greenspan so close and vivid you want to tug him until he enters your living room. This Greenspan is not only captivating; he’s light as a bird’s wing. Caught mid-gesture, his head bowed and his thumb gently brushing his chin, he seems poised to flutter away, ready to abandon his own book to a dull white background—and his readers to a series of theatricalist fun-houses that are both maddening and delicious.

Among them is a play in which a man plays his mother so his brother will impress his mother-in-law in return for his brother having played him to seduce his wife (Dead Mother). In another play, a pair of actors portray characters who break character to play actors in a play by an author like the author of the play the audience is watching (The HOME Show Pieces). There is a play in which a man plays a woman who plays a man who plays Orlando in As You Like It to win back his/her girlfriend, all without a single costume change (She Stoops to Comedy). There is a play in which the biblical Bathsheba voices the sexual fantasies of a man supposedly writing a play about her (2 Samuel 11, Etc.). And in The Myopia, Greenspan’s solo performance masterpiece, a sentient, English-speaking orb shatters as he tries to complete an unfinished musical about Warren G. Harding written by his late father, who is killed when his wife turns into a giant and squashes him for having an affair—or so Carol Channing tells us during intermission.

Greenspan’s plays are not obscure like Foreman’s or Wilson’s, nor dizzying conglomerations of high and pop culture like Reza Abdoh’s or The Wooster Group’s. These dramas’ narratives and characters are comprehensible but in unceasing ontological motion. Greenspan pushes the boundaries of theatrical artifice not only by having actors play ever-shifting characters but also by working his revision processes into his dramaturgies. “She’s a treat,” one character describes another in She Stoops to Comedy, “I mean a threat—it’s a typo.” “Clearly,” says Dionysus...