David Greenspan in I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan. Photo: Ahron R. Foster

“Theatre is annoying. It’s the most annoying art form there is. You have to make an appointment, you have to show up, you have to shut up the whole time, you have to actively participate by suspending your disbelief, and you have to pay a lot to do it,” says Sierra, who has traded playwriting for television writing and is trying to convince her friend Emmy to write a pilot instead of another play that might never get produced. Sierra and their other friend Mona–who makes the exact opposite argument, that theater matters deeply and shouldn’t be evaluated by a maximum profit model–sit to either side of Emmy on the couch in Emmy’s apartment, where they’ve come together to read Emmy’s new play, possibly Emmy’s last play. (Spoiler alert: we will never hear a line of Emmy’s play.) Or at least they sit metaphorically on either side of Emmy, because Emmy, Sierra, a fourth character who doesn’t show up till late in the play, and Mona (who is not a true representation of the playwright of the play for which we have all shown up and suspended our disbelief, Mona Pirnot, according to the prologue delivered from the playwright’s POV as a narrator one step closer to herself) are all played by the same actor, David Greenspan, for whom Pirnot’s play I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan was conceived. (Greenspan, just to be clear, also plays the playwright/narrator Mona.)

It’s an act of both enormous hubris and enormous humility to write a play to be performed by one and only one specific performer who is not the playwright themself. The playwright needs to be humble enough to know that the work will likely never leave her computer screen–she does not know David Greenspan; she is not herself a producer; she is not the rare sort of household-name-adjacent playwright whose work any actor would jump at the chance to do; even if she could get the play into Greenspan’s hands, he might not be the least bit interested. Not to mention that Greenspan is also a writer, so I’m Assuming You Know… is not only designed for him to perform but conceived in dialogue with his writing. Add to that several other layers of complexity: The playwright is a thirty-something woman and the play’s characters are an assemblage of her peers, four thirty-something female playwrights. The performer is a male downtown theater legend almost forty years her senior. The piece requires him to play all of its roles, as well as reading most of the stage directions. A good chunk of the dialogue is devoted to analyzing the foolhardiness of even attempting to make a living in the theater, and the depressing pragmatic choices artists need to make to live in the world.

So it also takes a kind of foolish confidence to devote one’s energies to this rather than a different project that could be done by any actor, anywhere; to think that David Greenspan is going to be not just “approachable” but willing and able to devote a chunk of his life to your play, no matter how thorough a tribute your play is to his talent. This confidence, of course, has been borne out by the fact that we are all sitting in this room. This confidence, as we will learn, is intimately intertwined with a particular circumstance of artistic privilege that Pirnot both resists sharing and has written the play, it feels like, at least partly to acknowledge: the privilege of the stability that comes from a financially successful partner who also respects and supports your work. (Pirnot’s husband is the very successful playwright Lucas Hnath, who also directed her last New York production.)

Deep in the snarl of that complexity, you will arrive at I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, which, Schrodinger’s-play-esquely, feels until the very moment you walk into the room that it might not actually exist. (And in fact it almost didn’t, even after it began, as its run was postponed three months by the Atlantic’s strike earlier this season.) The writer does, of course, assume you know David Greenspan; the play’s metafictional conceit and its philosophizing about art are perfectly fine things in and of themselves, but the selling point is clearly the intersection of those questions with the inimitable presence of Greenspan himself: Pirnot’s interrogation of how a young artist survives alongside Greenspan’s example of doing just that. Pirnot’s unadorned, prosaic dialogue with its rhythms of everyday conversation and the conceit of the performance, which is anything but realistic. You wouldn’t go if you didn’t want to see the endless hall of mirrors that is theatrical polymath Greenspan playing himself playing Mona Pirnot playing four playwrights, one of whom also is and is not Mona Pirnot, while also reading all the stage directions. (There’s a little of the famous “Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich” moment in Being John Malkovich to it, and since I literally fell out of my seat laughing at that scene–in a fortuitously almost empty movie theater, you can see how this show might be my cup of tea.) 

Anyone who is, like Pirnot (and myself), a fan of David Greenspan has likely seen him perform all the roles in a show before: His own play The Myopia, in the very same theater, in 2010. The Patsy, in 2011 and again in 2022. The libretto for Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, in 2022. On Set with Theda Bara, in 2023. And, like many of those other shows, the aesthetic outside of Greenspan’s supple virtuosity as a performer is simple: neutral walls, a deep gray settee, Greenspan dressed also in gray (both set and costumes are by Arnulfo Maldonado); moods hinted with subtle shifts in light (by Yuka Nakase Link). The marvelous thing here is how slowly Greenspan submerges himself, and us, in the playworld. Director Ken Rus Schmoll has done solo shows with Greenspan before, and knows the exquisite subtlety of which he is capable. So it’s obviously a choice to make the narrator Mona unadorned, only a short hop away from Greenspan himself addressing the audience (with a particular wink for when Greenspan-as-narrator-Mona avers that character Mona’s praise of Greenspan is the only literally true thing in the piece), and to give the characters flourishes of stagey affectedness in the early scenes: Character shifts done with exaggerated pivots. Flouncy gestures. A little actorly spin on the voiced stage directions.

But as we get into the meat of it—How does theater fit into the modern world as more than a “bad habit” for its creators? What kind of luxury is it to make a living at it? Whose idea was it that we could all do what we love and make a living? How do we value the pragmatic needs of living, like health insurance and savings and stability, against the worth and meaning of art?—all that staginess slips away. Schmoll guides Greenspan deeper into each character, into the way their friendships work, and, especially, deeper into Mona’s own inner conflict, culminating in Mona’s delivering a self-eviscerating monologue about her own presumptions to the bathroom mirror because ”in a play that’s a tribute to David Greenspan, someone, at some point, needs to be in the bathroom.” 

That monologue opens up everything the play’s more intellectual conceits are avoiding: for Mona, now, the conflict of art versus commerce isn’t purely philosophical. Her sister has been in a terrible accident and needs constant, ongoing care. Care that Mona could do more to support if she stopped writing plays and went back to marketing, or wrote for television, or did just about anything more lucrative. And yet here we are: deep in the luxury of a play that’s as ephemeral as a Buddhist sand mandala, a play that is designed to be produced only under the very precise circumstances in which David Greenspan is willing to participate. 

In the end, I will never turn down a chance to see Greenspan do what he’s so uniquely excellent at. But I’m also not sure which case the play ends up making:

Mona: Emmy, listen to me. Life is too short not to do what you love. 

Sierra: No, life is too short not to go to the hospital when you’re bleeding. 

Even in this most explicitly, intentionally theatrical piece of theater, we live in a world where we can’t reliably have both of those things.