74 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
THETHEATRE
A ONE-MAN APOTHEOSIS
David Greenspan does it all in Gertrude Stein’s “Four Saints in Three Acts.”
BY HELENSHAW
ILLUSTRATION BY CAMILLE DESCHIENS
I
t’s perhaps easiest to describe the
Lucille Lortel production of “Four
Saints in Three Acts,” starring David
Greenspan, by saying what it is not.
For one thing, it’s not at the Lortel,
which is in Manhattan, but at an ex-
perimental theatre in Brooklyn. Nor
is it really a play—there are elliptical
references to scenes and scenarios but
no dramatic dialogue. Gertrude Stein
wrote it, in 1927, for the composer Vir-
gil Thomson to set to music, subtitling
it “An Opera to Be Sung,” but Green-
span performs it solo, as a text without
a score. So it’s not exactly a libretto, ei-
ther. Even Stein’s title won’t tell you
what it is: Greenspan refers to around
twenty saints, and the show runs to
four acts, not three.
This production of “Four Saints”
brings us on a pilgrimage to a street
of warehouses in Sunset Park, into a
performance space hidden behind a
bright-yellow garage door. (Although
it is “in” the Lucille Lortel Theatre’s
season, this is Target Margin’s Doxsee
Theatre, home to the baroque, the fringe,
the abstruse.) Greenspan, dressed in a
simple blue shirt and gray pants, stands
on a square platform covered with a
pale Persian rug. Surrounded by gauzy
curtains glazed in honey-colored light,
this plinth, created by the set designer
Yuki Nakase Link, sits on a glassy black
surface and seems to float a few feet
above the floor. Greenspan therefore
appears to be on a flying carpet in a
room untethered from gravity and time:
the night outside is very dark, but in-
side we’re in a warm, eternal afternoon.
Stein’s spare, Cubist language—full
of puns and children’s rhymes (“one two
three four five six seven all good chil-
dren go to heaven”), sideways allusions,
and an insistent present tense—often
leaves readers and listeners at sea. “Pi-
geons large pigeons on the shorter lon-
ger yellow grass alas pigeons on the
grass,” Greenspan says to his puzzled
audience. The feline sixty-six-year-old
actor moves like a melodrama villain
who trained with Martha Graham, and
his exaggerations and stylizations of -
fer tantalizing glimpses of story. “Four
Saints,” though, can still feel like a com-
prehension test for a language that you’ve
been faking for years. The nouns pop—
saints, magpies, windows—but the verb
tenses are disorienting. If you’re lucky,
understanding creeps in through your
tissues, via a kind of capillary action.
What is Greenspan doing, all alone
onstage with this wild language? “Four
Saints” is the third in the actor’s en-
thralling experiments with solo per-
formance and the American canon.
(His own writing includes such down-
town landmarks as “The Argument”
and “Dead Mother.”) He started in
2011, with a soufflé, a one-man version
of “The Patsy,” a breezy Barry Con-
ners romance from 1925. Greenspan
played all the nineteen-twenties stock
parts—status-obsessed mama, resolute
pa, heart-of-gold daughter—with ges-
tural exactitude; it was easy to under-
stand who was gee-whizzing whom,
even in rapid-fire screwball conversa-
tion. Then, six years later, Greenspan
performed all six hours of Eugene
O’Neill’s unwieldiest work, “Strange
Interlude,” playing every character in
the nine-act psycho-potboiler. It was
a staggering achievement, and it won
him his sixth Obie.
Now he brings his high-affect tech-
nique to Stein, and she both gives way
and resists. Without Thomson’s com-
position to lean on, Greenspan must
rely on his own lacquered cadences,
which run the gamut from James
Mason-ish purrs (caressing, urbane,
The performer devotes himself fully to a modernist masterpiece. amused) to tinny yelps. The first, long
