Patsy, Jonas, David! We Chat with David Greenspan

The Patsy and Jonas are David Greenspan’s two new plays, which he’s performing through Aug. 13 at the Duke on 42nd Street. The Patsy is actually an old play: Written by Barry Conners, it was produced on Broadway in 1925 with a cast of six and later made into a movie directed by King Vidor and starring Marie Dressler and Marion Davies. What Greenspan performs—in a show produced by off-Broadway’s the Transport Group—is a 75-minute version of Conners’ play in which he portrays all the characters. Jonas is a stream-of-consciousness monologue penned by Greenspan that explores the backstory he created for Jo, the butler he played in the 2009 Broadway revival of The Royal Family (a contemporaneous play of The Patsy).

Theatergoers who have seen other works written by Greenspan will recognize some of his typical themes and motifs in Jonas and The Patsy: one actor doing multiple roles, hopping between eras, reflections on gender identity. As the author of numerous plays that have been produced off-Broadway—some of them solo pieces for himself, others works for a full cast of actors—and as an actor who appears regularly in plays written by others, Greenspan has crafted one of the most prolific and distinctive careers of any theater artist of his generation. He’s received two Obie Awards for acting, two for playwriting and one for lifetime achievement.

In the last year and a half alone Greenspan has been in no fewer than five productions at various off-Broadway houses, among them an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at Classic Stage; Adam Rapp’s The Metal Children at the Vineyard; Ma-Yi Theater’s Rescue Me; Go Back to Where You Are, which just ran this spring at Playwrights Horizons; and The Myopia, produced in early 2010 by the Foundry (he wrote the latter two). Greenspan spoke with BroadwayWorld over coffee in a West Village café on his day off last week.

Between the two plays, you hold the stage alone for two hours. Is this an exhausting performance for you?
There’s a lot of performance energy that gets going once you get started, so I don’t feel tired. The only thing I have to watch is my voice, which I rest during the course of the day.

You begin both The Patsy and Jonas by hoisting yourself up onto the stage, rather than entering from the wings. Isn’t that a workout in itself?
I didn’t anticipate that it would be as high as it is. The problem with a staircase is there’s a fire law; we’d have to move it once I got on stage, and that would have been a pause at the beginning of the show. So I figured out a way to jump up there as quickly as possible. It’s kind of serendipitous, I think. It’s like getting into a magic box. That’s in the spirit of the piece: It’s like a little jewel box, like a playpen in a way.

You adapted The Patsy with Jack Cummings III and Kristina Corcoran Williams, the artistic director and the dramaturge of the Transport Group. Is this a project you initiated?
Jack had seen my play The Myopia, in which I had played multiple characters, and had approached me about doing a solo performance of an American play. He proposed a play that I didn’t think was a good fit, I wasn’t sure I could pull off, so we talked about finding something else. And then I remembered the silent film version of The Patsy that I had seen a number of years ago, with Marion Davies, and I found very charming. It was based on a play, and I suggested it. So we got together and I read the play out loud to him and to his literary manager and dramaturge, Kristina Williams. We liked it and thought, “This might be fun.” We did a workshop of it where we spent at least a week abridging the play—it’s pretty long—so it would maintain its textual integrity. And we spent the rest of the workshop roughing out the staging. I liked the play so I didn’t want to damage it. We’ve done a very good job of preserving the story. I think anyone who sees the piece can follow it pretty well. The writing of that period...it’s a 2½-hour play. I’m not sure it would transcend its time in its entirety. I’m not sure it has the same snap, crackle and pop of the classic comedies [of that era].

Do you think this 85-year-old play has relevance for today’s audiences in terms of any social commentary?
No. It’s a romantic comedy, and it uses some of the conventions of classic comedy: subterfuge, the girl being smarter than the boy... It’s just kind of a sweet romance. The only thing, Kristina our dramaturge pointed out, is it was written before the bust. There’s a lot of land speculation [by the character Tony]. I don’t know what Tony’s going to do when the Depression hits and he has all that property.

Did you develop Jonas while you were in The Royal Family or afterward?
I wasn’t planning on writing anything, but I did give myself an assignment of having an offstage life, because there weren’t a lot of lines, I’d be on and off [stage] a lot, and I didn’t want to just sit around. The action was continuous in each act—there were no shifts in time—so I imagined where I would be at each point while I was offstage. And then I started writing something down. Some of it was based on my imaginings offstage, very much embellished and developed further. I completed it before the run was over.

Did you always write plays, or did that start after you’d been acting for a while?
I trained as an actor at the University of California at Irvine. I began to have friendships with choreographers at a certain point, and we started creating pieces that had monologues, so it really started kind of unexpectedly. Then I returned to acting class, and at that point my writing became more recognizable as a play, as opposed to a dance theater piece.

Do you have dance training?
I did take dance classes in college. I was never a good dancer, but I loved the ballet courses. When I came to New York, I took some ballet, for a sense of balance, a sense of being connected to my body. So I have some dance experience.

Toward the end of Jonas you mention working as a Los Angeles theater usher in high school. Is that what fed your theater bug early on?
I did that for a couple of years in high school at the Shubert Theatre in Century City, which no longer stands. It was the place for touring shows. I remember everything I saw there. Claudette Colbert in a little comedy called A Community of Two with an actor named George Gaynes. Carol Channing in Lorelei, a remake of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Sunshine Boys with the original cast. A Little Night Music with Jean Simmons and Margaret Hamilton. Jean Simmons was beautiful. Margaret Hamilton was a very skilled stage actress; she may not have had the European panache of Hermione Gingold, but she was quite good. The actor who played Fredrik has been in Phantom of the Opera forever and ever: George Lee Andrews. Gypsy…Angela Lansbury used to come through my door every night when she made her entrance. She was friendly to everybody. She left us a lovely note afterwards: for those of us who did aspire to the theater, hoping to see us someday. For a bunch of kids who were stagestruck, that was unforgettable.

Have you encountered her working in theater as an adult?
She actually handed me an Obie. I told her [the memory] when I met her at a party.

What other artists or performances have left an impression on you?
Everything I see has an impact on me. There are great performances I remember: I was in London once during college, and I’ll never forget seeing Janet Suzman play Hedda Gabler, seeing Judi Dench—this was in the ’70s, before most Americans knew who she was—as Beatrice in Much Ado, Richard Grifiths as Bottom. I played Bottom a number of years ago, and I stole some of the things I remembered from his performance. He was just priceless.

You’re known as an actor-playwright. With The Patsy and Jonas you seem to take on a new job: storyteller. Are you comfortable with that label?
Well, I’ve heard many times actors say—discussing with each other—we’re all storytellers. We do it through an impersonation, a characterization or interpretation, but we’re all telling stories. Certainly in Jonas, there’s actual narration. My other work, there’s storytelling in there. Go Back to Where You Are, it goes in and out of narrative. In The Myopia, a lot of stage directions are used as a storytelling technique.

Speaking of labels, how do you feel about “icon”? You’re considered an icon both of the downtown theater scene and of the gay community in New York.
I’m surprised you say that. I don’t think of myself that way. I just think: When’s my next job coming? I’m like any actor. I have a couple of gigs to do some of my solo work in the fall, but I’m on the lookout for my next acting job…. Mostly I think of myself as being very fortunate. I’ve had opportunities to act in my own work, but I feel just as fortunate to act in my colleagues’ work. I feel very connected to my playwriting colleagues, and I like to participate in their work as an actor.

On to more personal topics: Did you attend any of the same-sex weddings last weekend?
No. But as a New Yorker and certainly as a gay person, I followed it all very closely. I was at the Gay Pride Parade, and I had a perfect view of Andrew Cuomo. It was remarkable. The look on his face—I don’t think even he understood what this meant to gay people, this enormous stride in civil rights. I think he was just in awe [of] the sense of jubilation. I think he’s, obviously, a brilliant man and he understood the importance of it, but I don’t think he anticipated how much it meant to people, gay and straight. It certainly was an emotional turn of events.

You wear a wedding band. Do you consider yourself married?
Yeah. My partner and I have had this [looks at his ring] for years. We’ve been together going on twenty-eight years, so we’ve had this for... [says as if he’s estimating] twenty-five? In those days we called it a “commitment,” although at that time there was discussion about the hope for gay marriage. I remember Andrew Sullivan writing about it many, many years ago. So it’s been on my mind.

Top and bottom photos: David Greenspan performing Jonas. Second and third photos: The Patsy; Greenspan, second from right, with (from left) Michael Izquierdo, Mariann Mayberry and Brian Hutchison in Go Back to Where You Are.

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