Maternal impersonation

Bay Area audiences seldom get to see David Greenspan, recently described by The New York Times as one the theater's "glorious freaks," in his guise as an actor or playwright. But that will soon change as an old and a new project temporarily dislodge him from the Manhattan apartment he shares with his partner of nearly 25 years.

First to open is a rare revival of his 1991 off-Broadway play Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain, beginning performances this week at A Traveling Jewish Theatre in a co-production with Thick Description. "Hopefully, people will think it's funny," Greenspan said recently from New York. "But it is an attack on what I would call oppressive systems."

Greenspan, who attended first rehearsals of Dead Mother last month, will return to see the finished production, and also to perform his new solo show, improbably inspired by Artistotle's Poetics. After performing The Argument at Cal State East Bay, he is also working to present it at A Traveling Jewish Theatre.

These two productions alone give you a sense of the variations in Greenspan's three-decade career. A few more recent examples include a role as a female impersonator in Terrence McNally's Some Men, winning an Obie Award as Mephisto in Faust, playing an aging gay swinger in the lesbian pulp-fiction saga The Beebo Chronicles, working on a new adaptation of Aristophanes' The Frogs, and collaborating on a musical with Stephin Merritt (69 Love Songs).

On the phone, Greenspan is demure and soft-spoken, surprising for an actor and a playwright not known for holding back. "I wouldn't be known for my naturalistic acting," Greenspan acknowledged.

Back in 1991, when his play Dead Mother opened at the Public Theatre, he was also the director and played the central role of a son called upon to impersonate his late mother. Liam Vincent is playing the barely cross-dressing son in the SF production. "The play specifically asks that there be no drag," Greenspan said. "A strand of pearls is all that is needed for the transformation."

Greenspan has made some trims for the new production, directed by Tony Kelly. "I hadn't given the play serious thought for a number of years, and because I got a new computer and had to retype the darn thing, I thought, 'This is kind of funny. I think I'd like to see this one up again.' It sort of coincided with their interest in doing the play."

When it opened in 1991, Dead Mother produced a fierce critical divide. Frank Rich, in The New York Times, wrote a particularly scathing pan that essentially accused Greenspan of being an egomaniac with a maternal ax to grind. "I was hurt by that," Greenspan said, "but I've come to realize that the play is just such an attack on mediocrity, middle-brow small-mindedness, and it makes fun of certain theatrical expectations. I think to the extent that some people were invested in seeing themselves as very high-minded, it was kind of insulting."

The plot itself is difficult to summarize, though its situations are launched when a son impersonates his late mother because his brother's fianc?e insists on meeting their mother. This turns out not to be the character's first attempt at motherly impersonation. Once, when she was still alive, he took her place in his parents' bed in search of his father's approval.

"The mother, as depicted in the play, is a very emotionally violent, volatile, and angry woman," Greenspan said. "But hopefully, by the end of the play, one has a sense of some of the reasons why she became that way - how she herself was suppressed and was guided toward a conventional marriage she was not suited for. The ultimate oppressor in the play is the father."

Greenspan, whose mother died when he was 12, says the play is not "blatantly" autobiographical. "There are elements of my family that I make use of, but I never, for example, disguised myself as my dead mother."

He grew up in Los Angeles, where his father worked as an aeronautical engineer. After graduating from UC Irvine with a theater degree, Greenspan headed to New York to be an actor. "As for being a writer, it almost started out from a journal I kept. I began performing monologues, and I got involved with somebody who was making dance-theater pieces."

In Dead Mother, Greenspan was able to make use of all the facets of his education and theatrical training. "It has phantasmagorical elements, and there's a whole Greek section. There's a monologue about microbial evolution, and a trip to hell led by Alice B. Toklas. Basically, it's the kind of play that just comes out slugging, and then never lets up."

Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain will run Jan. 10-Feb. 17 at A Traveling Jewish Theatre. For tickets, call (800) 838-3006 or go to www.atjt.com.