There we were, not quite 40 of us — most of us seated at a long, narrow table covered with a tight black cloth, and fewer of us on stools against the walls of The Brick on Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Avenue.
Having been instructed to turn off all devices and keep our arms and anything else we might have off the table, the lights faded. Suddenly, there was David Greenspan in white shirt, vest, trousers and shoes reflected in a mirror behind him. Instantly, he rampaged into Joey Merlo’s On Set With Theda Bara, a 60-ish-minute fantasy — okay, “fantasy” is a handy way to describe it.
In it the always adventurous, ever-indefatigable, slim and innumerable expressions-bearing Greenspan does what he adores doing: playing several parts without benefit of any supporting players. Only scant months ago and in another part of Brooklyn, he was everyone in a spoken version of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Only a few years back he was everyone in Eugene O’Neill’s ultra-strange Strange Interlude. And he was perfectly swell in both.
This time he starts out as the titular – and not terribly well remembered – film queen Theda Bara, who between 1914 and 1926 made 40-plus movies and into the bargain popularized the word “vamp.” She was Cleopatra and Salome, among her famous vamping roles, only a handful of them still extant due to a long-ago destructive storage house fire.
Because she was strictly a star of silent films, few adulating fans knew what she sounded like. Nevertheless, Greenspan gives her a voice and accompanying histrionic presence. During the On Set With… hour, he discourses grandly and gestures while seated and standing at one end of that long table, repeatedly sweeping to the other end. He ambles atop the table, pushing aside eight lighting fixtures along the way. He lies while prone and supine on the table. A non-stopper, that’s Greenspan.
Intermittently and sometimes so quickly that audience members must think fast to catch up, he also impersonates a missing young, Theda-Bara-obsessed fan; her desperate father Detective Finale; and equally Theda-Bara obsessed piano accompanist Ulysses — the caboodle directed with unending and unerring imagination by Jack Serio.
To tell the truth, which is supposedly a reviewer’s obligation, I can’t say I know what playwright Merlo is entirely on about. Surely, he’s fascinated with the Theda Bara mystique, an obsession not a large percentage of the population is nowadays — not as much as folks might have been a century ago when a man-seducing woman loomed more of a societal threat than she does today. (Sex symbols Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot were never considered threats, though maybe women in film noir were Theda Bara-like holdovers.)
More to the On Set With Theda Bara point, Merlo may be probing identity, not sexual identity so much as pure Who-Am-I identity. The Merlo-Greenspan Theda Bara is thrown by an adoring public with a full belief of who she is. She has no idea. The screen’s Theda Bara, manufactured in the dream factory of the period, was born in Egypt and so on and so forth. Theodisia Burr Goodman was born a Jewish businessman’s daughter in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“We gave the world new ways to dream,” Norma Desmond, as a Theda Bara type, sings in Sunset Boulevard, but that new way to dream is a nightmare for the On Set With… Theda Bara. But if the hardly unfamiliar question of identity is a vital part of the playwright’s intentions, I’m not convinced what the rest of the exercise adds up to: a repudiation of hero-worship, maybe?
What Merlo’s fantasy does add up to is a pack of fun, another indelible addition to six-time Obie-winning Greenspan’s list of achievements. Few, if any members of the New York City theater community have anything resembling his imposing (and rewarding for audiences) curriculum vitae. It’s as if he’s driven to turn everything he takes on into an event, as this only week-and-a-day run is.
Who knows what defiant self-imposed and impossible-sounding task Greenspan will tackle next or is already preparing? Is he readying a dramatic reading of the Manhattan phone book? Don’t rule it out. In the meantime, catch him as Theda Bara et al.
One last somewhat relevant word: This review enables me to note — as many others once did but few take the opportunity to now — that the name Theda Bara is an anagram of Arab death. The celluloid Theda Bara retired in 1926 and died at 69 in 1955, in Los Angeles.
On Set with Theda Bara opened February 1, 2023, at the Brick (Brooklyn) and runs through February 8. Tickets and information: theexponentialfestival.org
