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.
