Credit: Eric Carter
David Greenspan has spent over four decades in New York’s off-Broadway theater scene, but this weekend, Pine Plains will be the stage for his unique brand of experimental theater.
A six-time Obie Award-winning actor and playwright, Greenspan has captivated audiences with performances that blend the intellectual with the emotional, often diving into texts that others might shy away from.
His performances at Stissing Center on Sept. 21 and 22 will showcase Plays, a lecture written by Gertrude Stein that challenges conventional ideas of what theater can be. It is the final performance in the center’s first season of the Downtown Upstate festival, which comprised three experimental plays over three weekends in both Pine Plains and at the Ancram Center for the arts.
Greenspan, known for his distinctive voice and mastery of solo performance, spoke with the Herald to discuss his long career, his approach to Stein’s work and the enduring power of experimental theater.
How did you first get into theater and how did you follow that first experience into a 40-plus year career?
Well, my introduction to theater was really through the recordings of musicals. Musical theater, American musical theater. The first play I actually saw was on TV. It was Mary Martin’s version of Peter Pan. It would come on every year, and I loved watching it. It had been a Broadway musical, but they were able to broadcast it in a studio setting. It was something I looked forward to every year, the same way I looked forward to The Wizard of Oz, which was broadcast once a year. Then I began to study in high school. I was interested in plays and musicals, and I became interested in dramatic literature. That’s why I followed up with a B.A. in drama at UC Irvine, always with the idea of coming to New York. When I was young, New York was where you knew theater was. It’s an artistic mecca, for the performing arts and for all the arts. I came to New York with dreams of being on Broadway, in musicals and in plays. But things didn’t happen that way. I found my way to the downtown theater scene. Over the course of, you know, over 45 years now, I found a niche for myself as a playwright, as a performer, working with other playwrights as an actor, developing my own solo projects — one of which is the Stein I’ll deliver over the weekend — and other solo projects I’ve generated. So it’s truly through sticking with it and trying to find more and more of a niche for myself, a place where I can work and be accepted as part of an artistic, theatrical community.
What first drew you to Stein’s writing, and how do you feel her approach to theater aligns with your own style as a performer?
I don’t know when I first became acquainted with Stein’s work, but I use the lecture — when I discovered it — to work with students on what experimental plays could be as opposed to more conventional, traditional plays. I am drawn to it because the ideas open different possibilities for what a play can be. And, I have a natural affinity for the cadence of her writing. I’m also quite interested in the performative potential of a non-dramatic text. A lecture is still a performance. I’m quite interested in that. I had adapted Aristotle’s Poetics into a 45-minute monologue that I wrote. With that, too, I was drawn to the idea of how explicating a subject — in both cases theater — would be of interest to me as a performer and hopefully of interest to an audience.
Is Plays about plays and theater, or is it about lectures or does it encompass more?
It’s certainly about theater. In fact, I think for Stein theater and plays are inseparable. Even the reading of a play has, for her, a sense of a theatrical experience that one is visualizing as well as hearing the words. So, I would say that it’s about both. It is also very much about the process of trying to understand something. The lecture is as much explicating or expounding on theater, as it is her attempt to discover it through her own questions, her own reflections and memories, experiences. So it’s as much a sense of discovery as an explanation.
What is interesting to you about performing a lecture?
It’s a monologue, not in the conventional dramatic sense, but it’s still a monologue. I try to still evoke a character. It may not be — certainly in the case of Stein, I don’t know what Aristotle sounded like, but there are recordings of Gertrude Stein — but I don’t try to give an impression of her. I try to follow as closely as I can, and I get better at it with time, because I’ve performed this lecture for many, many years now. It’s an explication of her view of theater but also her experience of theater, starting as a child. It’s truly divided into two sections: The first is how she has experienced theater and she gives specific examples of seeing Sarah Bernhardt, certain operas, and the second section is really about how she approached plays and what she is trying to do with them. I try to use my performing abilities to make her points as clear as possible and to evoke a sense of character in how it’s delivered. But the goal always is to engage the audience both intellectually and emotionally.
Stein’s work often plays with sight and sound in unique ways. Can you share how you interpret her exploration of these elements and how you bring them to life on stage?
I bring them to life only by speaking them, and there are some repeated hand gestures I use to help the audience follow repeated motifs that she offers in the lecture. So that the points she repeats become clearer and clearer each time, and it’s also so the audience has a reference point to all of the things that she is trying to make clearer to them. Stein became more interested in the relationship of sight and sound to emotion, emotion within the audience, as opposed to story and action. Her experience in the theater, ultimately, became muddied as a spectator because she’d be so occupied with what she was seeing that she would stop listening and she would lose the sense of the action, she would forget what was going on. But Stein wanted to do something in which people didn’t have to remember anything, that they could just continue to experience the sound of words and also the association certain words would have particularly when they are placed adjacent to other words. How that would imply things and how that would create an emotional experience in the audience.
In exploring all that a play can be, have you found that there is anything a play cannot be?
I’ve never really pursued that question, so I can’t say that I have.
In your performance, you deliver Stein’s words in a way that has been called ‘lilting’ and ‘sardonic.’ How did you develop this specific delivery, and what choices did you make to balance the humor and complexity of her writing?
Her writing is naturally humorous, she has a wicked sense of humor, and witty. So I really didn’t have to do anything other than pay attention to the text and begin to detect when indeed she was being somewhat humorous. Part of a lecture, if it’s very dry, the audience might just tune out. Stein wanted to engage her audience, and she is pretty successful at it in all of her lectures because she is able to engage them with a sense of wonder, a sense of humor, and a sense of intellectual curiosity. So all I had to do was really discover, as best I can, when she is doing that and how she does it. Having performed it again and again, over a number of years, I’ve learned each time the signals she’s presenting that allow that form of entertainment to come to the forefront. The main thing I’m trying to do is to make her points as clearly as possible. In doing that, you tap into her sense of humor.
You’ve had a long and distinguished career in off-Broadway theater, both as a playwright and performer. How do you think your experiences in the New York theater scene have shaped the way you approach works like Stein’s?
The whole idea in the off and off-off-Broadway movement was to allow for theater that wouldn’t be, at least not immediately, commercial. That’s complicated because there are shows that are done off, and even off-off-Broadway, that would be completely accessible in, say, a Broadway setting or in a large institutional theater, as opposed to a small institutional theater or an off-off-Broadway setting. So it varies. But there certainly are experimental theater companies or venues in which things that are typically less conventional can find a venue. I think my experience of the theater is that there is more of an openness to experience something that would not be as conventional. The theater you see as a place like the Manhattan Theater Club is not necessarily the theater you’re going to see at a place like the Wooster Group, which is a much more experimental off-Broadway theater. That experience has allowed me to really delve into a variety of theater, anything as unconventional as Gertrude Stein, to something like a revival of The Boys in the Band, by Mark Crowley, which by this point is not in any way an experimental play. Or by Terrance McNally that I’ve done. So the off-Broadway experience for me is that you could really do any number of things, and there really should be no limit to the kind of theatrical vocabularies that can be employed.
Over the last several decades of working in, consuming and creating theater, has the mainstream gotten more experimental? Is the needle moving toward a greater acceptance of non-traditional ideas or forms, have you found?
It’s hard to say. It really depends on the venue or on the theater company, what they’re willing to produce. The most avant-garde is always going to be a bit of an outlaw. And it’s more likely to be rejected by a mass audience because they don’t understand it yet, or they don’t see it, or see its value. Sometimes it’s only in time that a larger audience can understand and experience a work of art. But when it’s first written, or painted, or composed, it seems not just incomprehensible, but unapproachable for an audience. So I don’t think that’s changed in any significant way in the theater.
There’s still places that will take certain artistic risks that can’t be taken somewhere else because of the nature of their subscriber base or the audiences they serve. It’s like on Broadway; certain musicals or plays might not last as long as those that are easier to appreciate by, say, a tourist audience, not as acquainted with a wide theatrical vocabulary.
You’ve been associated with off-Broadway for over 40 years. How do you see the evolution of off-Broadway theater, and where do you think it is headed in terms of experimentation and boundary-pushing work like Stein’s?
There are a number of things. In terms of off-Broadway, one of the challenges, particularly now, is real estate. I got my start in a small store-front theater in Tribeca, where there were warehouses and plumbing supply stores and things like that. Those aren’t there anymore. It’s harder to put a play up in certain downtown spots where it once was easier. Real estate has changed. So something people would not have imagined 40 years ago was that plays would be done in Long Island City, or Bushwick, or Ridgewood, or as far out as Sunset Park. In terms of welcoming, I can’t even call them experimental, because really every play is an experiment. Sometimes the more interesting things are the things that fail, either to be proved later, or because the writer, artist, or audience all learn something.
So I think there’s a lot of room right now for new writing. I wouldn’t call it experimental, but I would call it contemporary. Stein never uses the word experimental, she uses the word contemporary. She refers, in another lecture, to the ‘contemporary composition’ — that is, how people are living in the moment they are living, and how that’s inextricable from the art that they make.
What do you enjoy about performing on a stage?
I like entertaining people. I consider myself an entertainer. By that I don’t mean something just like a sitcom or lounge act — though I think there’s nothing wrong with a lounge act or a sitcom — by entertaining I mean, entertaining people’s minds and emotions. To engage people intellectually and emotionally. That’s how I see myself as an entertainer. I like to find things that are interesting, and really anything that I do, I find of interest in different ways. To share that with people.
I also believe deeply in the phenomena of theater — which is that people gather together to hear a play. There is an emotional experience in performance, and hopefully the audience thinks as well as feels. I believe very deeply in that. As opposed to something that’s more insulated or private. With theater, you come together, people attend together, and each performance is, of course, different. The audience and the performers are inseparable. They impact on each other on how a play runs during the course of the performance.
Were you able to support yourself through theater alone?
No! I worked as a waiter for at least 10 years when I first came to New York. Even when I’ve had certain opportunities that have led to some exposure, there are times where I’ve had to go back to editing quizzes for textbooks or abridging books for audio production, any number of things. Even today, economically, my partner is a public school teacher, which means he has a steady income, and while we both contribute to the household income, his is the lion’s share. Without him, I don’t know what I’d be doing. There’s no guarantee that anyone will even make a living, let alone a good living. Hopefully, you can scrape by. Some people have made a very fine living doing theater, film, or television, but for me it’s always looking at the bank account to see what there is, what’s in there, or what’s not in there.
What would you say to young people, or anyone really, who is interested in pursuing theater but may find themselves disillusioned with the high costs of living, in New York in particular?
No profession is easy, but certainly the theater has never been something that most people can thrive at economically. It’s always a struggle. It’s never been a thing where most people in the theater are supporting themselves solely through their creative work. Sometimes they do. But it’s been that way from the beginning. People have to be very resourceful and creative in terms of continuing their artistic careers and development.
Nobody should feel disillusioned. I’m very adamant when I speak to younger people, and I really advise them not to listen to anybody who would discourage them. I did the same things they’re doing now in terms of trying to manage money through side jobs to start a theater career. But I still have to go out and raise money if I’m doing a project of my own. It’s an ongoing process.
I work with a lot of young people. The more my career goes on, the younger everyone else gets. I don’t know how that happened. But I see young people that I work with, and they are very, very resourceful. I did a play. Someone asked me to do this play. I think they were going to pay me a thousand dollars to learn a solo play that we would do for eight shows. I said, OK, I’ll do it, and the director and the playwrights begged, they borrowed and they built it. The director was hanging lights, hammering and sawing and everything else to get a relatively simple set on the stage. They did it all themselves, and they raised money. They were very resourceful, very determined and very dedicated. I certainly would advise younger people to strive for that attitude. Don’t let anyone dissuade or discourage you. Be resourceful, dedicated, and determined. I like to joke, if nothing else you can just use clip lights. Hang up some clip lights, turn them on and start acting. Do whatever you have to do.
How do you feel about coming to perform in the rural town of Pine Plains?
There’s no real difference in a way, because if there’s a stage and I can get on it, I’m game. I love to perform. I love any kind of theatrical setting. I don’t know the audience, I don’t know who will be there, but I’ll do my best to entertain them, to engage them emotionally and intellectually with the piece I’ll present. If it’s of interest to you, the originator of theater is Thespis, that’s why actors are called thespians. The followers of Thespis — he was the first actor. Not only did he invent acting, you know, playing characters, he also invented touring. He used to tour around other places bringing his masks and his props and perform from his wagon. He would entertain people anywhere. I’m very much of that spirit.
What can audiences expect from your performance?
I think they should expect something unusual, something fun, and they should expect something that will hopefully be thought-provoking and entertaining.
David Greenspan will perform Plays, a lecture by Gertrude Stein, at the Stissing Center for Arts and Culture at 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 21, at 3 p.m. and Saturday, Sept. 22. Tickets can be purchased online or by calling the box office.