Does I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan Bring a Theatre of the Director to the American Stage?

Sometime before 534 BCE a young rhapsode named Thespis was discontented with the limitations the chosen form of his expression imposed on him. So he started to experiment. First, he stepped out of the chorus and faced the audience alone, but that did not feel quite right. There was a sense of hubris in that act alone that went against what Thespis hoped for. So he painted his face in white lead to make sure that the audience would realize that not only was he not part of the chorus, but also he was not Thespis. The white lead did not allow for much variation and, after a few unsuccessful attempts to find other means of expression, Thespis settled on a mask made out of linen. Thus, tragedy—and with it Western theatre—was born.

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This account is, of course, pure fabulation on my part. Very few undeniable facts about Thespis are known. (For an account of ancient sources, see Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge’s Dithiramb Tragedy and Comedy. For details on Thespis experiments, see Jennifer Wise’s Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theater in Ancient Greece. And for an apology of Thespis as an actual inventor of tragedy, see Gerald F. Else’s The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy.) Thespis is a powerful and mysterious figure in theatre history. Aristotle’s Poetics mentions him, but only briefly and as a kind of insignificant precursor to the great tragedians. Yet it is commonly believed that Thespis was the first actor, or at least the first tragedian to introduce an actor. He is powerful as a kind of hero of theatre mythology and mysterious as an actual theatre practitioner. I believe him to be the first theatre director.

With the few facts we have at our disposal, it is clear that Thespis faced a directorial problem. He had a story that he wanted shared with the audience, and he lacked the means to present this story in a compelling fashion. So, he invented those means, which resulted in a way of telling stories that Athens was not accustomed to. The stories in his repertoire stayed largely the same. What Thespis changed was their staging.

Aristotle may have benefited from a distinction between a script (playwriting) and a show (directing), since he talks about both.

The same goes for further developments in the tragic form, like the later additions of the second and third actors by Aeschylus and Sophocles, respectively. And while the lessening of the role of the chorus is more of a playwriting development, the systematic use of Deus ex Machina by Euripides is certainly another example of a directorial innovation. Even Aristotle’s famous elements of tragedy—Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Melody, and Spectacle—quite clearly pertain to two different iterations of what he called tragedy. The first three elements can easily be encountered on the pages of tragedies that survive, but every surviving text will lack the last three elements because they can only be encountered in a production. The first three elements—Plot, Character, and Thought—are imitated by means of the last three elements—Diction, Melody, and Spectacle. Aristotle may have benefited from a distinction between a script (playwriting) and a show (directing), since he talks about both. It does not cross his mind to make a formal separation, but he does not shy away from an informal one.

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Two millennia later, David Greenspan “plays four millennial women in a comedy (full of drama) about how to make a living as a playwright (or to try.)” at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York City in a play titled I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan by Mona Pirnot, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. This wonderful production is an opportunity to talk about the function of the theatre director.

I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan has a sparse and elegant set, designed by Arnulfo Maldonado. It has a wooden floor, three white walls with spaces upstage left and right, and an office-like ceiling in a square grid. Center stage stands a couch. The set demands a very geographically concrete lighting design by Yuki Nakase Link, which is minimal as well. It widens and narrows the space around the actor to create dynamism to the story and serves as a kind of editing technique.

The story revolves around four playwrights at different stages of their careers: One is toiling in a TV writers’ room, another is thinking about stopping, a third is being supported by her more successful playwright partner, and the fourth is delivering pizza after an inspired production at an Off-Broadway theatre.

The dramatic question of the play is whether one of the characters will pursue her dream of being a playwright. The characters are meeting for a reading of the last draft of her play, but one of the readers is running very late. So, three playwrights spend their time conversing about their professional lives and the state of American theatre.

To Mona, one of the characters, David Greenspan is an undeniable hero. The show begins with a kind of diary entry or an unsent letter to Greenspan. Similar diary interjections are peppered though the play, performed by the real David Greenspan. They serve as a source of both humor and tension, since the character who authored the entries shares a name with the playwright. Before the show begins, the audience is aware that this production is a personal triumph for Mona—both the playwright and the character—simply because the play is titled I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, written by Mona Pirnot, and Mona-the-character is performed by David Greenspan. This fact renders the conversations about the bleakness of modern life in theatre optimistic: The play exists as a performance for a paying audience, not as hand-written notes of a despondent playwright in a drawer.

The rest of the show is, of course, David Greenspan himself, a legendary New York theatre artist originally from Los Angeles. The play is really a professional love letter to him and would be the first thing to reference as an introduction to his art. He is most famous for his ability to play a multitude of characters at once in dialogue with one another—four is not the limit for him.

Greenspan is truly a consummate theatre performer. He has developed a performative vocabulary that perfectly deals with multiple characters in a single body on stage. He employs gestures, sightlines, and body positions to distinguish between characters. He does so beautifully and simply, with such ease that his technical prowess might go unnoticed. His body is expressive and his line delivery is rhythmically dynamic: He uses tonal shifts (in conjunction with the gestures) to mark transitions between characters. He usually speaks in a higher-pitched voice for the first few words of the next character’s line. Yet he does not employ characterization that much. It’s not like one of his characters speaks in a baritone and another in a soprano. His characters do not have quirks that distinguish them from one another. The only thing Greenspan does is clarify which line was said by which character. Greenspan seems to leave character work to dialogue. As Pirnot mentions more than once in the play, Greenspan’s acting is unlike anything else.

The combination of minimal lighting, sparse set, technical performance choices, and everyday dialogue provokes the audience’s imagination. Simple, quotidian pantomimes like opening or closing the fridge, together with a consistent geography of a small New York apartment as established through lighting, force the audience to imagine not only the setting, but the characters and the situation. Twenty minutes into the play, a whole other spectacle is happening in every audience member’s mind—as it was in mine.

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Herein lies a conundrum. Greenspan, like Thespis, created a theatrical form that is particularly well-suited to dealing with multiple characters. Pirnot, inspired by this form, wrote a play that can really only exist within the confines of Greenspan. Had the play been performed by four millennial actresses, it would inevitably turn into a rather tragic tale instead of the hopeful anthem to theatre’s perpetuity. Had it been performed by a single actor, even if they were on par with Greenspan’s ability, it would become, in a way, a story of competition with Greenspan. But Greenspan’s theatrical form is a directorial achievement. And Pirnot’s use of the form at the stage of writing the script is also a directorial decision. The myth, so to speak, that she wanted to share could result in any number of plots, but her vision that precipitated the creative process was directorial—in the sense that a certain type of staging guided the writing. But if the directing style was woven into the fabric of the play, I wonder, what was Schmoll’s job?

In I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, it seems, the function of the director was performed by the playwright and the actor.

My background is in Russian theatre. A general consensus on modern American theatre in Russian theatre studies is that it is “the theatre of the playwright.” A general consensus on Russian (and European) theatre in American theatre studies is that it is “the theatre of the director.” For what they are worth, both statements seem to be true in some fashion. But it seems that in the case of Russia, the function of the playwright is underestimated and in the case of the United States the same can be said for the function of the director.

In Russia, countless productions of classical drama that depart from original texts and prose lack a playwright in the playbill. It goes without saying that the director was the author of a theatrical adaptation of, say, a novel and that the additions, abridgments, and changes to a classical play were done by the director. But both dramatic adaptations of prose and reworkings of classical drama result in contemporary plays, even though it is seldom viewed as such by Russian critics. In other words, the function of the playwright is often performed by the director, and the results of that work are called directing. In I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, it seems, the function of the director was performed by the playwright and the actor. Which is to say, Pirnot’s and Greenspan’s directorial inputs leave me wondering: Who is to blame for the theatre of the director on an American stage—the playwright, the actor, or the director?