Greenspan, David (1956- )

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    Screen Time: A Film Star Captivates, and a Writer Is Surveilled

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    David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in “On Set With Theda Bara,” and marionettes star in Vaclav Havel’s play “Audience.”The performance space at the Brick, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is already veiled in haze when the audience arrives. A long table draped in black runs down the center of the room, lit by sconces and hanging lamps, their soft glow reflected in mirrored walls at either end.There’s a ghostly, expectant feel to it all, as if we’ve entered an alternate plane where specters might be summoned. You wouldn’t be surprised if a séance broke out. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling phantasmagoria that is the play “On Set With Theda Bara,” indeed one will.A certain channeling of spirits, though, begins as soon as the performance does. The actor David Greenspan takes his place at the head of the table, with the audience seated on either side, and becomes the glamorous silent-film star Theda Bara, or a version of her. Identity is slippery in this play, as it was for the actress, who started out as Theodosia Goodman from Ohio but was marketed by Hollywood, under her screen name, as an exoticized Arab.Obsession with her is the gossamer string that binds Theda to the other characters in this campy, comic solo show: Detective Finale, a gay 21st-century gumshoe looking for his missing child; Ulysses, a movie-theater organist enthralled with Theda ever since one of her films aroused him to distraction at the keyboard; and Iras, Finale’s genderqueer 16-year-old, who would become Theda Bara if only that were possible.“The Theda I want to be is like — transgressive but unproblematic, know what I mean?” Iras says. “Like minus the appropriation and stuff.”Greenspan, a virtuoso of multicharacter solo shows, gives a wild ride of a performance, fleet-footed and mercurial but capable of great stillness, too. Stalking, twirling and dancing through the space, even treading on the tabletop, he is quite something to behold, with Stacey Derosier’s lighting finely calibrated to his every move. (The set is by Frank J. Oliva.)Written by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio and presented by the Exponential Festival, this play collides periods and period styles along with storytelling genres. It’s part noir, part vampire tale; a vampire — a predatory woman — was one of Theda’s most famous roles.Like any decent vampire, Theda is undead: 138 years old, by Iras’s calculation, but still looking — Iras tells her when they meet — just as she always did onscreen. Holed up with Ulysses, Theda watches clips from her old movies on YouTube, which she pronounces, adorably, as YouTubah.“Things are strange here,” Ulysses says, and he could easily be speaking of the play. “Reality seems to move about. You’ll be in one place one minute and in another the next. And it’s not only the place that moves but time as well.”In a whipsaw-changeable show that employs just a single costume (by Avery Reed) and almost zero props, it’s not always clear which character is speaking — and the protean Theda has more than one voice. That periodic smudginess is less bothersome than you’d think, though.Only at the very end does the play turn too murky to work. Until then, Greenspan renders it entirely fascinating.Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan in “Audience,” a production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater that is set in a brewery, at La MaMa.Jonathan Slaff“Audience,” a puppet version of an autobiographical Vaclav Havel play at La MaMa, in the East Village, has the opposite trouble: a lively finish, but a glacially paced staging whose intriguing aim is never close to realized.Directed by Vit Horejs, who performs it with Theresa Linnihan, this production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is set in a brewery, where a playwright works, rolling barrels. A brewmaster-informant chats him up, hoping for scraps of intel.Two large projection screens are suspended over the playing space. (Production design is by Alan Barnes Netherton.) One screen displays live, black-and-white video from multiple cameras aimed at parts of the stage, to suggest the oppression of constant surveillance. The other shows color close-ups of the performance.In Horejs’s English translation, it’s a very talky two-hander, but the marionettes (by Linnihan, Milos Kasal and Jakub “Kuba” Krejci) don’t have moving facial features, which makes for unfortunately static close-ups. The acting, alas, does not captivate, so the spying never feels real enough to make the surveillance images meaningful.There is a smart video prelude to the performance, though: a sleek newsreel (by Suzanna Halsey) that gives a quick and clever Czech history lesson to contextualize the play. Bit of a disappointment, what follows.On Set With Theda BaraThrough Wednesday at the Brick, Brooklyn; theexponentialfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.AudienceThrough Feb. 19 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      in Music

      ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ Review: An Opera Becomes a One-Man Show

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      The actor David Greenspan is a tour-de-force, taking on all the roles of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s large-cast opera from 1934, sans music.One minute the actor David Greenspan is giving the preshow speech, as welcoming and easy as can be, explaining that the theater has held the curtain a few minutes because of trouble with the subway, and asking us, the audience, to turn off our phones.An instant later, with no warning whatsoever, not even a change of light, he has slipped into the play and pulled us with him. It seems somehow like he’s gentled us into it with benevolent trickery — as if he’d said, “Look! Over there,” and while we were distracted ripped a Band-Aid off our skin.Because, truth be told, even those who adored the experimental virtuosity of his earlier solo projects “The Patsy” and “Strange Interlude” might approach his latest project with some trepidation: a staging of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s large-cast, 1934 opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” as a one-man play, divested of its music.The script is simply Stein’s libretto, unaltered — a chaotically opaque, willfully bizarre text that occasionally turns inquiring and poetic but is most often principally concerned with the sound of language and the human voice. It doesn’t much go in for fripperies like character and narrative and sense.Actual number of saints in the play? Dozens, though you will swiftly catch on that Saint Therese is Stein’s unrivaled favorite. Number of acts? Four. This show wants to mess with you, and it will — especially since Thomson decided, before the opera’s premiere in 1934, that Stein’s stage directions should be verbalized by the performers, just part of the show.The Lucille Lortel Theater, which is presenting “Four Saints” at the Doxsee in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, seems to acknowledge the audience’s potential unease, emblazoning the cover of the program with a quote from Stein about the play: “If you enjoy it you understand it.”I’m not so sure that’s true of her text, but it certainly is of Greenspan’s mesmerizing interpretation, which rides the circles and switchbacks of Stein’s language like a current. His tone and volume ever-shifting, his sense of humor well in evidence, he makes flickering sense of her verbiage, even as the fragments together form a cyclone of non sequiturs.Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the lives of saints should look elsewhere; nothing in this play is that conventional. Still, the performance is approachably easy to enjoy, with one strict caveat. If you are the caregiver of a small child who is going through a repetitive phase, “Four Saints” is likely to drive you straight up the wall. Repetition, loads of it, is Stein’s métier.“Ordinary pigeons and trees,” Greenspan says, somewhere in the thickets of Act 3. “This is a setting which is as soon which is as soon which is as soon ordinary setting which is as soon which is as soon and noon. Ordinary pigeons and trees.”Well, of course.Greenspan’s mesmerizing interpretation rides the circles and switchbacks of Gertrude Stein’s language like a current.Steven PisanoWatching Greenspan perform this play, with his silent-screen expressiveness and full-body eloquence, is like watching a manic movie montage spliced together from bits of film, each brief segment making a kind of sense in its moment, independent of the whole. Or like watching channels flipped fast fast fast by someone with zero attention span. And yet Greenspan doesn’t squander a second.Stein, for all her formidable reputation, liked a good time — and loved experimental derring-do. This pleasurable production, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll and designed by Yuki Nakase Link, makes me wish Stein could see it, maybe trade letters about it with her good friend and playwright pen pal Thornton Wilder, whom she first met when “Four Saints” was new.“Stein often referred to ‘Four Saints’ as a play,” Greenspan writes in a program note. “I have taken her at her word.”Ninety-five years after she wrote it, in 1927, her text is as inscrutable as ever. Yet Greenspan, an intrepid investigator, has thrown himself into its mysteries and come away relishing them. Through the generous affection of his meticulous performance, so do we.Four Saints in Three ActsThrough Oct. 9 at the Doxsee at Target Margin Theater, Brooklyn; lortel.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      At 52, Mabou Mines Is Still Testing Boundaries

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      A three-day retrospective will shine a spotlight on the group’s most daring projects.The word “crazy” comes up fairly regularly when talking to people about the Mabou Mines theater company.Take one of Sharon Ann Fogarty’s early experiences with that fabled group — nine years before she became one of its co-artistic directors. It was on “Mabou Mines Lear,” a gender-reversed production of “King Lear” — not obvious back in 1990 — that was directed by Lee Breuer and starred Ruth Maleczech as the monarch.“The opening scene had dogs and all these kiddos so my job was to pick the kids up around five o’clock, drive them over, do the scene and drive them back,” Fogarty, now 65, said. “Then I would come back, and I was doing various other parts. One of them was holding down Isabell Monk while Honora Fergusson gouged her eyes out. It was kind of a crazy, crazy time,” she continued, “but it was really fun.”Starting Thursday, Mabou Mines is celebrating 50 years of theatrical experimentation with a three-day megamix, a retrospective of some of its most notorious, daring, beloved, memorable or, yes, craziest projects. (The company is actually 52 years old but the celebration was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.) The works will include live readings, concerts and films, in conjunction with a companion exhibition of archival material, at the Mabou Mines home in the 122 Community Center, in the East Village, where the group settled in 2017 after decades of a peripatetic existence.The 1990 staging of “Mabou Mines Lear,” a gender-reversed production of “King Lear,” featured, from left: Kandel, Ruth Maleczech and Greg Mehrten.Michael CooperThe performing arts, by definition, exist in the moment, so mounting a greatest-hits package — especially of an Off Off Broadway company — is a daunting task. Mabou Mines got the idea for its extended birthday party after a founding member, JoAnne Akalaitis, spearheaded a 12-hour tribute to the playwright María Irene Fornés at the Public Theater in 2018. “So when we came to talk about Mabou Mines’s 50th, JoAnne said, ‘Why don’t we just do a marathon of all the pieces?’” Fogarty recalled.This would have been more than 60 works, so they settled on 31. “Some are going to be excerpts, some are going to be full, some are just going to be the music,” Fogarty said. “Some of them are an hour, or you get 15 minutes, like a juicy scene or something.”The programs will bring former company members back to the fold, along with simpatico guests such as Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel, who will perform Franz Xaver Kroetz’s “Through the Leaves,” produced by Mabou Mines in 1984, on Thursday. The following day Akalaitis will direct David Greenspan, Ellen McLaughlin and Ellen McElduff, a former company member, in Samuel Beckett’s “Play,” which Mabou Mines staged in 1971.The time machine will travel all the way back to Mabou Mines’s first project, “The Red Horse Animation” (1970), which was conceived during a retreat in the isolated Nova Scotia town that gave the company its name. On Saturday, Akalaitis — who was in the original production — will reprise it alongside a pair of first-generation Mabou heirs: the writer, director and actress Clove Galilee, who is Breuer and Maleczech’s daughter, and the choreographer David Neumann, the son of the Mabou members Fergusson and Frederick Neumann, who died in 2012. (Akalaitis’s then-husband, Philip Glass, another founding member, wrote the music.)Tight family bonds have always been part of the Mabou Mines matrix — the group, born out of the experimentations of the 1960s, blurred the personal, the artistic and the political. Akalaitis, 84, recalls that the children of company members tagged along on tour in the 1970s and babysitters were in the line budgets for rehearsals — an afterthought for many current theaters.A still from “Moi-Même,” a movie that some of the Mabou Mines artists shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969 but never finished. It will be shown this weekend as a work-in-progress backed by a live band.John Rounds“Looking back, it was based on a very sound socialist principle that we are all equal and we all get paid the same amount of money, whether we’re working or not,” she said of the company’s precepts. “And when there was no money, there was no money — there wasn’t money for some.”Breuer, who died last year, had quickly emerged as a dominant personality, and he directed some of the troupe’s most famous shows, such as “Peter and Wendy” (the story of Peter Pan told by a solo actress and puppets, in 1997) and “Mabou Mines Dollhouse” (Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” with the men played by actors under 5 feet tall and the women by actresses who were nearly 6 feet, in 2003).At the same time the company embraced decision-making by consensus, which did not necessarily help speed things along. “Consensus building is very, very hard but I also think it’s the only way to do it,” Akalaitis said. “If you have a group of people who basically have big egos and don’t want someone else to be the boss, the only way to do it is that everyone’s the boss.”Even now, the company split leadership responsibilities among four co-artistic directors: Fogarty, Karen Kandel, Mallory Catlett and Carl Hancock Rux.The major reason Mabou Mines has endured for a half-century is that it has always drawn like-minded people who thrived on experimentation. Kandel remembered her first experience with the company, working on “Mabou Mines Lear” with Breuer and Maleczech. “There was a kind of trust that whoever was doing whatever role, you would find your way there,” Kandel, 69, said in a video conversation.Clockwise from top left, Fogarty, Rux, Kandel and Catlett. The shared leadership model, the co-founding member JoAnne Akalaitis, said, “was based on a very sound socialist principle that we are all equal.” Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“There was the shy me and then there was the thing inside of me, and that’s what Lee wanted to see come out,” she continued. “One time I said, ‘Why am I going to climb up this telephone pole?’ Lee’s response was something like, ‘Don’t ask me those questions, that Stanislavski [expletive]. Just climb up the pole!’” (Kandel would go on to star in the Mabou hit “Peter and Wendy.”)Past and present are inextricably entwined in “Moi-Même,” a movie directed by Breuer that the artists who would go on to form Mabou Mines (except for Akalaitis and Glass) shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969 but never finished.Breuer’s son Mojo Lorwin retrieved the footage and during the pandemic went over all 16 hours of it with his father on Zoom — there was no script and the dialogue was never dubbed in, so Lorwin, 38, was trying to figure out some sort of through line. “I did the vast majority of the work on it after he died but it really feels like a collaboration because he gave me this stuff to work with, but he left me all this space, too,” he said. “So I’ve written a script, I decided what these things mean.”On Saturday, “Moi-Même” will be presented as a work-in-progress backed by a live band and the Foley artist Jay Peck, with Kandel voicing all the adults and Declan Kenneally all the kids.In a way, it will be a bridge between Mabou Mines’s prehistory and what may lie ahead. “The future will be, hopefully, something that still feels like us,” Kandel said, “but won’t look like us.” More