The Brooklyn Rail

After the Atlantic Theater Company shut down performances over a labor dispute with backstage employees in early January, Mona Pirnot’s new play I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan was shelved along with Eliya Smith’s Grief Camp. The parties reached a tentative agreement in early March, paving the way for both plays to return—starting with Greenspan, a solo show built around the downtown legend of the same name.

Pirnot made waves as the writer/performer of last year’s I Love You So Much I Could Die. With her back to the audience, she fed monologues through a text-to-speech program and sang original songs reflecting on medical trauma. Now, she’s teamed up with the six-time Obie winner Greenspan for a comedy about a group of millennial playwrights, all women, who get together to read a friend’s new play. The Rail spoke to Pirnot and Greenspan about the project in December, before the work stoppage began.

Douglas Corzine (Rail): So, first, how would you both describe this play?

Mona Pirnot: Do you want to go first?

David Greenspan: No, you go first; you wrote it.

Pirnot: The play is written and tailored around David’s speech, his mannerisms, his baroque style. It’s also an audit of the state of theater right now. So formally, it’s playful, but the content wrestles with what it costs to live a life in theater.

Greenspan: It’s also, I think, about friendship in relation to work and different careers.

Rail: Mona, you knew David’s work but didn’t know him personally when you wrote the play. What was it like asking him to get involved?

Pirnot: David was always my favorite part of every play I ever saw him in. Then I read She Stoops to Comedy, which became one of my favorite plays, and when I saw The Patsy in 2022, I went on a deep dive and read everything he had ever written, watched whatever archival videos I could. So I had this quiet obsession, and I thought delivering this Valentine to him could look either freakish or enticing.

That was where Ken Rus Schmoll, our director, felt critical. He’s a perfect match for the play, but he also has this relationship with David. I reached out to Ken, who had directed two plays of my husband’s [Lucas Hnath].

Greenspan: The first thing Ken told me was, “She’s kind of obsessed with you.”

Pirnot: Oy!

Greenspan: I gave it to my partner Bill to read, and he thought it was very funny. He said, “But there is some hero worship in there, David. I don’t know how you’re going to say this stuff on stage.” I read it, and I agreed. Then we decided: why don’t we just read through the play? We met at the Atlantic and—

Pirnot: And I was on my best behavior, trying to pull back the enthusiasm. It was a really riveting first read. I said, “If you want to keep working on it, I’d love to, and I just want you to think about it,” and then we locked him in.

Rail: There’s a line where Mona’s character says, “In four years, he’ll be seventy. Could he still do this kind of thing at seventy?” David, I wonder how you read that moment as you decided whether to take this on. Did it feel like a dare?

Greenspan: No, it didn’t feel like a dare. That sequence just felt like an interesting observation on the part of Mona. You know, I never turn down an opportunity to work, and this play was different from the other things I’ve done, so I thought, “Someone’s giving me an opportunity.”

Pirnot: In the section you’re talking about, I was thinking about David getting this script called I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan and being like, “What the hell?” I didn’t actually know the person, so I wasn’t sure how he felt about doing it in one year or two or three or four. Now I know he’s going to be two hundred years old and doing these solo plays.

Right after that line is, “Oh, David, there’s so much that I wish I could tell you.” I wanted to go, “Here’s a little bit about me. Here’s my heart. I know this is strange. I wish you knew me so that you trusted me, so that you would do this play.”

Rail: Mona, I Love You So Much I Could Die is also autobiographical. So much of that story is mediated through another “David”—a Microsoft text-to-speech program. How does writing for a computer compare to doing so for an actor?

Pirnot: I’m interested in autobiography and autofiction and avatars. I Love You So Much I Could Die was autobiography. It was about as personal as I could stand to be, but I wanted to make myself a faceless avatar so people could sort of overlay their experiences onto the relatively blank set in front of them. Because I was writing for this text-to-speech tool, there was no attempt to reenact the material: I was not delivering it myself and people weren’t taking cues from my face. That allowed me to be more brazen, more honest.

I would call I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan autofiction. There is a lot of true life stuff in this. But all of it, like he says in the prologue, is mulched up and repurposed.

I think the autobiography/avatar thing is about wanting to capture a fraction of my enormous feelings. With I Love You So Much I Could Die, it was grief. With David, it’s affirming why I do theater. I’ve lost my faith, then I have this religious experience and remember why this is my faith, and I can’t tell you, so he’ll show you. The strongest argument I could make is not telling you what David can do. You have to see it.

Rail: One of the big throughlines in the play is thinking about the financial realities of working in theater. Why do you think that honesty is important?

Pirnot: I think it’s empowering for people to have more information, and it’s also kind of bold! It’s more taboo to talk about money than to talk about sex. I know more of my friends’ sexual escapades than what they have in their bank accounts. I think the more information, the better. I’m also kind of impish, and I think it’s genuinely naughty to be like, “All right, the check I’m waiting for is 3,150 dollars.”

Greenspan: Mona and I share something also. The play discusses how she’s able to maintain a creative life through a relationship: I have the same situation because my partner is a full-time schoolteacher. It’s not a corporate job with the corner office, but it’s a steady income, then I contribute, too. That’s somewhat privileged in a way, or it’s a privilege, having stable relationships—not everybody has a partner to share the bills. So there’s a lot of things that determine longevity, but all of that could change at a moment.

Rail: I’d like to end by asking about the last scene. The character Emmy has written a play, and she wants her friends to make a judgment for her. Do you think her play can prove that she needs to keep writing for theater?

Pirnot: I think the point is she’s doing theater right now in her apartment. That’s theater, too. Getting together, having your friends come over, ordering some food, and reading a play out loud is theater, and sometimes it’s the best theater.