DAVID
GREENSPAN
Greenspan is perhaps best known for appearing in his own plays, most notably Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, Go Back to Where You Are, I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees— and his solo plays The Argument and The Myopia. He has performed solo renditions of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Barry Conners’ The Patsy, Gertrude Stein’s lecture Plays and a program of Stein lectures Composition... Master-Pieces... Identity. He has worked with many contemporary playwrights—drawing special notice for his performances in Terrence McNally’s Some Men and in revivals of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band and Goethe’s Faust.
He is closely associated with several New York theaters, particularly Playwrights Horizons, Target Margin Theater, Transport Group, the Bushwick Starr and the Foundry Theater and is a recipient of Guggenheim, Lortel and Fox fellowships, Alpert, Lambda Literary, Helen Merrill Playwriting awards, a Ruthie, and six OBIEs.
NEW PLAYS BY
DAVID GREENSPAN
A HORSE’S ASS
1526. Mantua. A homosexual man will be forced at knifepoint to marry a woman. He’s tearing his hair out. In the end he discovers that his “bride” is a young man disguised as a woman and that the joke is on all those who have been impressed upon him the importance of marrying a woman. A Horse’s Ass is a loose adaptation of Pietro Aretino’s Il Marescalco (The Master of the Horse). Aretino’s play is notable because it is a Renaissance comedy with an openly homosexual protagonist.
NOT FOR NOTHING
Playwright Leone de’ Sommi was a Mantuan Jew who wrote plays in Italian for the dukes of Mantua, and in Hebrew for his community in the Jewish ghetto. Not For Nothing is a conflation of de’ Sommi’s Hebrew play, A Comedy of Betrothal, and his treatise, Four Dialogues on the Art of Staging Plays. In the former, de’ Sommi uses comedy to criticize greed in the Jewish community, the second contextualizes the play and incorporates aspects of de’Sommi’s biography—specifically those of a Jewish playwright navigating the environment of sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Mantua.
