It's a Smackdown Between Show and Business in "Irishtown," "I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan" and "minor•ity"

 

The ever present tension between art and commerce moves centerstage in three recently opened off-Broadway productions—Irishtown at the Irish Repertory Theatre, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan at Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, and Colt Coeur's production of minor•ity at the WP Theater—all three aiming to tickle theater insiders while also pointing out the more worrisome cracks in the current state of the art form.

Irishtown is set in the rehearsal room of a Dublin-based theater company that is preparing to bring a new production to New York. It’s a big deal for all of them: the high-strung playwright Aisling is eager to cash in on her recent hit, the British director Poppy needs a fresh start after leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company under mysterious circumstances, the veteran actress Constance sees the show as her last chance at the big time and the ambitious ingenue Síofra is more than willing to sleep her way to the top. Meanwhile Quin, the only male in the group, is a mansplaining malcontent.  

But everyone politely makes nice to everyone else until Quin raises the uncomfortable question of whether Aisling’s play, a #MeToo drama set in a British courtroom, is Irish enough. Where he wonders is the fiddle-playing, the poetic mysticism, the village drunk, the philandering priests, the downtrodden peasants or, at the very least, the trauma brought on by The Troubles?

The troupe’s attempts to add some of those elements because they think that’s the only kind of Irish work American audiences will pay to see allows the real-life playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth to poke some good-natured fun at the familiar tropes that turn up in so many Irish plays, including those that are usually done by the Irish Rep., which gets points for willingly going in on the joke.

But Smyth’s play also poses more serious questions about why certain cultural representations end up on our stages, limiting the kinds of stories that people from those groups get to tell about themselves and the ways that rest of us think about them.

The entire Irishtown cast—anchored by Kate Burton playing against type as the questionably talented Constance and Saiorse-Monica Jackson, a star of the popular TV series “Derry Girls,” appropriately annoying as Síofra (click here to read more about that actress)—is totally game as the fictional troupe improvises bits that pay comic homage to Samuel Beckett’s bowler-hatted simpletons and the ritualistic jig in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. But the direction by Nicola Murphy Dubey is so frenetic that they end up pushing too hard and Smyth’s smart satire collapses into just so-so farce.   

The playwright Mona Pirnot goes even more meta theatrical with I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan. She not only wrote the play as a one-man show for the downtown acting icon to perform (click here to learn a little more about him) but she also uses it to tell the story of how the show came to be and to explain why it’s so hard for playwrights today to do the kind of work they most want to do. 

I have to be honest and say that I wasn’t looking forward to this show because Pirnot practices the kind of writing popularized by the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård who dispassionately blends memoir, fiction and cultural critique into hyper-realistic accounts of his life that are far too solipsistic for me. 

Similarly, Pirnot's previous work I Love You So Much I Could Die was a solo piece in which she spent the entire time with her back to the audience while a computer voice read texts about a tragic event in her life (click here to read my review of that one). 

So I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and just plain old funny I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan turned out to be. It’s about a group of women playwrights who get together for an informal reading of one of their plays. They’re all at various stages in their writing careers. 

Sierra has gone into the far more lucrative if less satisfying career of writing for TV. Mona, the same-named stand-in for the playwright, remains committed to the theater and is working on an experimental piece centered around the actor David Greenspan even though she knows it’s unlikely to have broad appeal. Meanwhile their host Emmy is at a crossroads, not sure she can afford to follow her playwriting passion while still paying her bills. 

All of them—and a fourth character—are played by Greenspan. Dressed in a casual shirt and dark pants and working on a bare stage except for a covered bench, he whirls around the stage for a full 90 minutes, recreating the disagreements and encouragements the women share with one another. 

Greenspan and his frequent collaborator director Ken Rus Schmoll have worked out a few signifying gestures and slight vocal changes to distinguish each woman. I still was sometimes confused about who was speaking but it ended up not mattering much.  

For there's no question that Greenspan is a beguiling performer and while they’re not new, the arguments that Pirnot makes about the challenges of making art are compelling. At one point the Mona character notes that a playwright can expect to make about $3,000 for the entire run of an off-Broadway production that may have taken them years to write. That's a little less than the average monthly rent for a studio apartment here in the city.

The battle between art and commerce zooms in on the black experience in the Cape Verdean-American playwright Francisca da Silveira's minor•ity, which focuses on three artists of African descent who have been invited to an international festival in Paris where wealthy white donors are looking for artists to sponsor.  

But for those artists that means balancing the integrity of their work with the images of African artists that those patrons prefer. And in some cases that means amping up their accents, trading jeans and designer jackets for traditional tribal garb and spinning tales about ancient African myths or contemporary African woes. 

Da Silevira manages to draw some humor from these choices (and from the shout-outs to the brands supporting the faux festival) but it's a kind of laugh-to-keep-from-crying humor. And because da Silveira is a young playwright (note the overly cutesy punctuation for the play's title) the pieces in minor•ity, don't line up quite as smoothly as one might want.

The show has also clearly been produced on a small budget, although costume designer Celeste Jennings seems to have grabbed most of it and used the money to good effect for her spot-on costumes. 

Luckily, the production has also been blessed with a strong cast, spearheaded by Ato Essandoh, who may be most familiar to some theatergoers as the chief-of-staff to Kerry Russell's American ambassador to England on the Netflix series "The Diplomat."  

Under the confident direction of Shariffa Ali, Essandoh and his castmates Nedra Marie Taylor and Nimene Sierra Wurch dig deep into the angst of these artists struggling to compromise just enough to be able to do their work without compromising their dignity.  

It's always been tough to be an artist. It's even tougher nowadays. These shows, faults and all, are a reminder that those of us who love theater should be grateful that despite such obstacles, artists like da Silveira, Smyth, Pirnot and Greenspan keep finding ways to make it for us.