“Is the thing seen or the thing heard the thing that makes most of its impression upon you at the theater?” asks David Greenspan, channeling Gertrude Stein in his one-man show The Myopia. Anyone who has seen the 68-year-old, six-time Obie Award winner perform live knows that both things can be simultaneously true. Or rather that, in the words of Mona Pirnot—whose new play, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, pays homage to the multi-talented actor and playwright—“theater is not just about the thing seen and the thing heard: it’s also about the thing felt.”
Pirnot, 32, knew she wanted to be a playwright from an early age. Growing up in Sarasota—“an artsy pocket of Floria”—she poured her energy into writing Christmas plays with her family, performing dances at nursing homes, singing at farmers’ markets, and directing sketches for local community-theater groups.
At the University of Miami, where she studied acting as an undergraduate beginning in 2010, she crafted an individualized playwriting curriculum with the help of her mentor, the playwright Edith Freni. One of Pirnot’s plays even won the university’s inaugural playwriting competition and had a run on campus. “The bliss I felt during that time was clarifying,” she says. “I’d found what I’d been circling. I was a playwright. I’d never been happier.”
But after graduating, in 2014, and starting to find her voice as a playwright, Pirnot became increasingly disillusioned with the industry. “I had been writing some material that was an audit of sorts,” she recalls. “The aspirational phase of my career was ending, and I was starting to get real opportunities. But with that came a new set of challenges I hadn’t anticipated.”
“I’d moved past the stage of submitting to everything, constantly getting rejected, and being thrilled just to have a reading a thousand miles away with a $40 travel stipend,” Pirnot says. “I was finally being produced, but I began to realize how tough it is to sustain a career when years of work are compensated with little more than stipends. I started writing about those experiences, but the material itself didn’t feel formally exciting.”
Then came a transformative moment: Pirnot watched Greenspan star in a revival of The Patsy. “It was life-affirming,” she says. Inspired by Greenspan’s “transcendent” artistry and his unmatched ability to inhabit multiple characters—or to let the characters inhabit him—Pirnot dove into Greenspan’s vast archive. She read everything he’d written and watched recordings of some of his older performances.
“When I became obsessed with David, these two things—the struggles of sustaining a career and the sheer joy of what makes theater worth it—felt connected.”
I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan sits at the intersection of a personal obsession and professional disillusionment.
“I want to write a play about how much I love the work of David Greenspan, written in the style of David Greenspan, as a tribute to David Greenspan, for David Greenspan,” says one of Pirnot’s characters. It’s also a play that only Greenspan could bring to life. As another character observes, “This man can be the only man onstage but somehow populate the stage with all these people, all these people start accumulating onstage, like David Greenspan is leaving a little trail of David Greenspans.”
Greenspan embodies four different millennial women as they update each other about their lives and kvetch about their careers; one has recently become a “free agent” after pivoting from playwriting to the world of television, while another is on the cusp of calling it quits as a writer. Tonally, the play sits somewhere between a female group chat and a wistful meditation on the precarity of art-making.
The audacity of proposing such a play to its subject wasn’t lost on Pirnot. She initially shared her idea with Ken Rus Schmoll, a director with ties to Greenspan. By that point, the play had undergone seven rounds of revisions. “I’m a slash-and-burn writer,” says Pirnot, “but with this play, I wanted it to be in really strong shape before I dared send it to [Greenspan].” When he finally received the play, “he had his husband read it first as a sort of ‘crazy test,’” Pirnot says, laughing.
It passed with soaring colors. Greenspan agreed to a reading at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company. “Hearing him perform the words I wrote was surreal,” says Pirnot. Being in the same room as her hero and watching him perform “makes a better argument for why theater matters than any conjectural thing I could have written down and put into characters’ mouths,” she says. “You just have to see David do his thing.”
I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan runs at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company through February 9
Rhoda Feng is a Washington, D.C.–based writer whose criticism has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, the TLS, The New Republic, and The New York Times. She is the winner of the 2022–23 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism
