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Marissa Copeland and David Greenspan.
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Double drag
"She Stoops to Conquer," with its female character in drag played by the male playwright in his street clothes, is a self-referential theater in-joke that suffers in the transition from downtown to uptown.
By CARAID O'BRIEN
Offoffoff.com
David Greenspan's latest work, "She Stoops to Comedy," is poised to sweep the Obies this year and I am not sure why. (Everyone else liked it, could I
have seen it on a bad night? Do shows uptown have bad nights?) In his play about how an author writes a play (I need a new character, 'k. fine. I'll
call her Kay Fein), Greenspan's roles as director, author, actor and character are constantly being alluded to throughout the performance. When not
in the scene, he sits on the sidelines and watches the action. The characters reference themselves in frequent interior monologues (the audience
thinks the other characters can hear me speaking now!) which is a clever if ubiquitous device used liberally throughout this piece.
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| | | SHE STOOPS TO COMEDY | Written and directed by: David Greenspan.
Cast: Mia Barron, Marissa Copeland, David Greenspan, E. Katherine Kerr, T. Ryder Smith, Philip Tabor.
| | SCHEDULE | Playwrights Horizons
416 West 42nd St.
Previews start: April 3, 2003
April 13-27, 2003
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It was almost exciting to see the downtown aesthetic of the late eighties/early nineties (when Greenspan first made his mark) dusted off for an uptown
audience, but a certain glam and glamour was gone. Greenspan plays an actress dressing in drag and so actually looks just like himself in street
clothes (the play's Big Idea!). Heavily schooled in the trademark style of the Theater of the Ridiculous, Greenspan strips down gay stereotypes into a
bland, gap aesthetic for this show. While Charles Busch made his drag queen into Linda Lavin for Broadway's "Allergist's Wife," Greenspan
takes the repackaging a step further. In an attempt to scrub away queeny clichŽs (while still playing a queen), Greenspan decamps the camp — not
just taking out the drag queens but playing it straight — creating a new hyperminimalist, supposedly intellectual camp style that's just not as fun.
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| It was exciting that a minor character who had previously delivered only a handful of lines seemed about to hijack the play, but then he
quickly recessed into the background once again. | |
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Greenspan alludes to Charles Ludlam's most famous work, "Irma Vep," by attributing the generic line "I beg your pardon" to the legendary scribe, but his
script makes you think more of Ludlam's "How to Write a Play." The play's play is about Alexandra Page, a lesbian actress whose lover Alison gets a
role in a Maine production of "As You Like It." The promising young male lead — a French-Canadian with a speech impediment, drops out and Alexandra
decides that she in disguise will try out for the male lead. Greenspan spoofs independent film directors with the Hal Hartleyesque character Hal
Stewart who directs the Maine production with a Shakespearean cast of four and is well played by Philip Tabor. The script is very fey and endlessly self-referential — joking about postmodern theater and What is it? and Are we it?
The costumes looked like the actors' own clothes. The set was curtainless and bare except for a bed. The seeming economy of the production
values didn't jibe with the Playwrights Horizon's shiny new Peter Jay Sharp Theater with its uncomfortable college lecture hall style seats. (Has the rowdy, raucous,
seamy downtown theater been transformed into a Starbucks-Ikea like existence? Is this success?)
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| | T. Ryder Smith (center) with Marissa Copeland and David Greenspan.
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The actors play it straight and under par with the
possible exception of Greenspan, whose lesbian actress was more of a photocopied version of the homosexual male stereotypes — as actor T. Ryder
Smith bemoans in his very long, almost exhilarating monologue about gay clichŽs in the theater. What was exciting about this moment is that it
seemed a minor character who had previously delivered only a handful of lines, was about to hijack the play — taking center stage for about ten
minutes, saying repetitively: Who needs another play about a gay man who _______ ? (Fill in the blanks: is a hairdresser, has AIDS, is lonely, etc.) But then he
quickly recesses into the background once again.
This sweet-spirited play (I wished I liked it, I wanted to like it) would have been fun in a dusty storefront ten years ago with a little more moxie, but the
humor was too in-crowd droll to be funny here, especially when stripped of the high-energy supertheatricality of the downtown theatrical milieu of the
nineties, palpably missing from this production.
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APRIL 24, 2003
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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