Theater lovers who collect performances by David Greenspan as ephemeral works of art – for that’s what they are, truly – will savor his delightful appearance in a smart new solo comedy written especially for his remarkable proficiency at being several people simultaneously in conversation. Any newcomers to Greenspan’s sharp, quirky, fluent artistry, of course, are likely to be pretty much baffled by the often rueful insider chitchat that fuels I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, a 90-minute comedy regarding diehard theater writers and their hardscrabble lives.
Intricately composed by Mona Pirnot and elegantly staged by Ken Rus Schmoll in a minimalist production, the play opened Sunday for a brief stay at Atlantic Stage 2. For devotees of Greenspan’s singular artistry, seeing him perform up close in a 98-seat theater located below street level is like finding buried treasure.
A playwright relatively fresh to the Off Broadway scene, Pirnot has written a few solo works, most recently I Love You So Much I Could Die, which she performed with her back turned to the audience at New York Theatre Workshop in 2024. Her I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan is not so experimental an endeavor, but it expects the audience to have some awareness of Greenspan’s work as a writer-actor and generally about Off Broadway and regional theater circumstances.
While Pirnot’s writing proves to be layered, on the surface her contemporary story looks simple: Several 30-something friends, all of them women who are playwrights, casually get together at Emmy’s place in Brooklyn to give a first time reading of Emmy’s new play. While they drink cheap red wine and wait for a late-arriving chum, the writers discuss the impossible economics of struggling to eke out a decent living working in the theater. Emmy, Regina and Mona (a stand-in for the author) make little money by their writing – doing survival jobs and unable to pay for health insurance – and they are chronically broke, unlike Sierra who became a story editor on a TV series two years previously and is now raking in ten thousand dollars a week. An assertive soul, Sierra argues that the only playwright that non-theater people can name is Shakespeare. “Our relevance peaked and died with Shakespeare,” says Sierra, urging her friends to give up on the theater and write profitably for other media.
If such theater chitchat is frequently droll, it paints a bleak professional picture brightened by the inner flame of devotion most of the characters reveal. There is further one’s realization that I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, crafted as a complex, mostly verbal work for a virtuoso performer, exists best in the theater. Its structure as a play is intriguing in the way Pirnot frames the story with an introduction couched in presumably her own voice (mentioning personal details and thoughts) and then several times interjects it amid the characters’ talk about their struggles and hopes. Meanwhile, Pirnot’s alternate persona as Mona is telling her friends how she is working on a play written in the style of Greenspan as a tribute to Greenspan that she dreams he possibly might perform some day.
It’s an Escher sort of an ambition, but that’s what actually transpires at Atlantic Stage 2, as Greenspan depicts these people sharing theater talk. At times the actor also speaks the stage directions such as “Mona scoffs. A little too bitterly. The other two turn to look at her.” Greenspan accomplishes this all brilliantly, as only he alone can do it. To describe the artist’s sinuous genius at instantly delineating among the characters by a turn of the head, a drop in vocal tone or pivoting the body is, well, far beyond the reach of a thousand descriptive words, but the feline shadings and eloquence of his gestures and features are marvelous.
Commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, the play receives a top notch production from Atlantic Theater Company. Director Ken Rus Schmoll, who has collaborated previously with Greenspan, dresses him simply in a plain shirt and slacks and puts him within a handsome neutral environment designed by Arnulfo Maldonado. At times lighted simply and other times beautifully by designer Yuki Nakase Link, Greenspan’s lean, keen figure and expressive face create ever-mutable magic.
