Review: 'On Set With Theda Bara' Starring David Greenspan

The show: ‘On Set With Theda Bara’ by Joey Merlo at the Brick Theatre in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, starring David Greenspan. The production is by The Transport Group and the Lucille Lortel Theater.

What makes it special?: David Greenspan.

Who?: David is sui generis writer-actor whose work as a downtown theatre artist has earned him an armload of Obie Awards. He has created some extraordinary theater pieces on his own and often performs in works of others, as he does here in a one-act, 80-minute, solo play by Joey Merlo and staged by Jack Serio (who directed the critically acclaimed “Uncle Vanya”). This show was first presented at The Brick last year and now has its encore production as a longer, extended run.

What else makes it special?: In a seemingly smoke-filled room, about 30 or so audience members sit around a 32-foot-long, wooden table, covered with a black cloth. Other theater-goers are seated in another single higher row behind them.

Greenspan performs his highly theatrical, multi-character story-telling at one end of the table, then at the other end, then all around the perimeter of the bricked-walled room — and even on the table itself, dodging low-hanging, tin-shaded lamps that cast an eerie haze. The extended table makes the famous breakfast scene in “Citizen Kane” look like an intimate high tea by comparison. But here, too, it shows the lengths great artists will go to dramatize a stylized point — as well as the literal distance they will go to make it.

Well, it’s certainly not a conventional proscenium or even thrust stage situation: Far from it. It was one of the most intimate and immersive theatrical experiences I’ve had in quite a while. (Don’t worry; there’s no audience participation or interaction in any physical way.) But you certainly feel that you are right in the middle of a mysterious, mesmerizing and weird world. Think of it as a theatrical film noir: with dim lighting, long shadows, heightened dialogue and arch acting. And a bit of camp, too.

What’s it about?: Well…hmmmm…..Greenspan plays a quartet of characters, starting with Iris, a gender queer teenager with an obsession with the Silent Screen-era star. She soon flees her home, with Iris’s gumshoe dad following, in search of his missing offspring. Iris eventually lands in Bara’s decrepit mansion — where Bara herself is discovered. (Iris notes, matter-of-factly, ”which would make you 139 year old.” ) But Iris isn’t the only Bara devotee: a Southern church organist has also made the pilgrimage to Theda’s manse.

Along the way, we learn that Bara, too, fled from her home in her time, landing in early Hollywood where she was transformed into this other-worldly icon. Transformation, body morphing, and shifting identities becomes the play’s vamp, in every sense of the word, repeating the theme with an increasingly seductive style and pose — until it finally sinks its teeth in and you are sucked in.

That’s a little much: Forgive me. Greenspan’s near operatic gestures and voice and Merlo’s extravagant/lyrical/camp writing invites purplish prose

Greenspan is like a over-the-top star from a long-ago time, with expressive body language, stylized hands and fingers ever-extended, and a swoony, modulating, fluid voice. Indeed in this seance of a play, he casts a spell, pulling you in for the close-up, even if you don’t quite understand the significance of every detail of the storytelling. The mystery and the mystique is the thing in Merlo’s fog-filled, alluring, haunted, queer world.

Major credit, too, goes to lighting designer Stacey Derosier, who creates a compelling world of light and shadows, engulfed in a dreamy and dangerous haze. There’s pitch darkness, too, that pushes dramatic limits.

Who will like it?: Fans of Greenspan and those excited by new theatrical experiences.

Who won’t?: Those who prefer their theater in more straight-forward, naturalistic ways.

For the kids?: Teen hipsters might like the unconventionality — though they might wonder who the hell Theda Bara was.

Thoughts on the way home on the subway?: After decades of exceptionally inventive work on a downtown budget — and living the modest life of a true artist — one wonders why this artist hasn’t received a MacArthur Grant, or some other kind of life-changing honor. He at least deserves his seventh Obie Award for his performance in this woozy, wonderful dream of a play.

Info:: The show has been extended through March 16 at The Brick, 579 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn. Transportgroup.org.