Heartbreak and True Love Amid Ukuleles and Jazz
Consider The Patsy
and Jonas, two new one-man shows from
David Greenspan, to be a handy pros and cons list for the performance style of…
David Greenspan. Presented by the perennially ambitious The
Transport Group, The Patsy is a
one-man adaptation of a 1925 three-act comedy now best known as the basis for a
1928 Marion Davies film; Jonas is a
new, brief, highly theatrical monologue about the powers of the imagination
written by Greenspan.
The Patsy is what
is generally referred to as a “well-upholstered” play. Sweetly zany Patricia,
ignored by her hysterical mother and social-climbing sister and not quite
understood by her benevolently distant father, sends off for books about being
witty (“repartee is repertoire,” one informs her on its back cover) to snare
her sister’s spurned ex-boyfriend Tony. Over the course of three acts, Patricia
gets off both some singeing zingers—“Go to hell,” her sister snaps. “I won’t
run your errands for you,” coolly replies Patricia—and some heartfelt
entreaties to Tony, asking him for lessons in making her unnamed love fall
for her.
Greenspan is a gift to theater lovers, the kind of sui
generis performer who is a creature of the stage, and his ample gifts are fully
on display in The Patsy. Chief among
them, glittering brighter than his immense, precise talent, is his uncanny
knack for locating the heart in the unlikeliest of places. Amid the creaks and
groans of Barry Conners’ original script, Greenspan has spotted, with his
magpie’s eye, little moments of truth that he polishes to a heart-rending
shine. When Patricia tearfully confesses to her father that she overheard her
mother wishing she had never had Patricia, The
Patsy proves itself to be more than a one-man stunt; there’s real emotion here
amid Greenspan’s whirling dervish performance.
With his slim vocal range, Greenspan must rely on
physicality and rhythm to convey the eight different characters of Conners’
play. He does so in the subtlest of ways, rarely resorting to whipping his body
from profile to profile to indicate a conversation. Instead, he slinks,
saunters, leaps and slouches across the stage, sketching the characters with
the deftness and vividness of a born caricaturist. That same marvelous
physicality is honed down to its bare essentials in Jonas, in which can be found everything that can be annoying about
Greenspan performances.
Jonas finds
Greenspan stationary on a stool, recounting stories about himself, a character
he once portrayed and a man that once lived in that character’s imagination.
The monologue relies heavily on repetitions, and director Jack Cummings III has
stripped Greenspan’s performance down to his voice, face and arms. Here we find the classic
Greenspan arm gestures, something like what Martha Graham would have
choreographed for Judy Garland: His limbs flutter like birds before slashing
the air, then slumping against his sides. The combination of the limited
variations in gesturing and the words repeated over and over again lull the
audience into a lethargy that The Patsy
wouldn’t have countenanced; Jonas is
the warm beer chaser to The Patsy’s
energizing shot of whiskey. (And Greenspan’s crisp diction on one of the
most-used words in Jonas, “dark,”
sounds eerily similar to the way Gloria Swanson utters that word as Norma
Desmond, a comparison made more convincing by the tight spot that is often on
his face and his perpetually waving, claw-like hands.)
There are moments of beauty in Jonas, but they are found in the midst of tedium. Perhaps one must
be a man of a certain age to truly appreciate Greenspan’s monologue; me, I was
far happier when Greenspan was leaning so far back he was perpendicular,
snapping his fingers and slinging out ’20s slang in The Patsy.
The Patsy & Jonas
Through Aug. 13, The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42nd St.
(betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), www.transportgroup.org; The Patsy, $39, both, $45.