There’s a special type of actor who dwells in New York. Perhaps they’ve done film work– they’re most likely still receiving residuals from Law and Order– but their primary dedication is to the stage. “The Actor’s Medium,” as Patti LuPone calls it. Of this special class of performer, David Greenspan is par excellence. He is known for his distinct type of embodiment, often playing more than one character in the context of a singular performance. He is an actor who is best experienced live: so much of his brilliance rests in his impulses and physical interpretations. Once you see him perform, it’s hard not to raise your standard for what an actor can do. What an actor can be. However, as much as Greenspan’s wonder rests in his sheer talent, he also emblematizes a type of artist from a certain period in New York’s history. A New York that was kinder to artists. A New York that generated creativity. A New York that admired nonconformity. This element of Greenspan’s career, the economic and cultural reality surrounding it, acts almost as a form of diegesis when he performs. It came through crisply in Joey Merlo’s On The Set With Theda Bara (The Brick Theater, 2024) when Greenspan recited lines about TikTok with the amusement of someone who’s never looked at the app. And yet, never had I seen a piece of art that so directly took on David Greenspan’s reality as a subject for art-making, until I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan came along. Inspired by her love of the actor David Greenspan, playwright Mona Pirnot (I Love You So Much I Could Die, NYTW) wrote a love letter not just to David Greenspan, but her love of David Greenspan, played by David Greenspan. Even writing a brief description of the play has the same jolt of originality and delight as watching the work itself.
I first learned of the show while perusing theater websites, making a list of upcoming things to see, but the strike at The Atlantic Theater curtailed the initial run after four previews. When the show finally came back– and an agreement was reached between the theater and the Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)– I jumped at the chance to see it. And see it I did and amazed I was at what I saw on stage: a story of four millennial women debating the merits of pursuing a career in writing, one having already sold out to write pilots for television, the other three bemoaning the impossibility and futility of it all. What is the point of making art? They all ask, through David.
This was Mona’s story. Misery felt at the frustrations of pursuing something with so little economic certainty. The glimmer of hope from the successes she’d experienced thus far. The frustratingly convenient stability gained from her marriage to a fellow playwright (Lucas Hnath) who managed to strike big. A writer using the unvarnished components of her daily life and own experiences to contend with the context of theatre-making– and the sometimes incomprehensible decision to pursue a creative path– told it through the physicality of this iconoclastic figure. I had never seen a writer be so unabashedly honest and had never experienced the use of the self as a means of innovation. The self as a tool to push theatrical form. In 2025, Pirnot reaches back to conjure the present and the future, and in doing so, produces a beautifully heartfelt piece of technically exciting performance.
I spoke to Pirnot in early April about how she came up with this project, what she considers the shift in her work post-2020, what it was like to collaborate with David Greenspan, and what the future holds. I, for one, cannot wait to see what she does next.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Eve Bromberg: It’s so interesting that you started our call by pointing out the echo in the background. I don’t think I realized that you also have a practice as a songwriter. That’s so cool!
Mona Pirnot: Yeah! The last show I did was half stories and half songs. I played music in between stories that were spoken by a text-to-speech tool called Microsoft David.
EB: I watched a conversation between you and Will Butler where I learned your guitar teacher was named Ishmael Katz. What an amazing name!
MP: It’s a great name! I wonder where he is now.
EB: I normally leave a question like this towards the end of an interview, but I’m curious about how I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan fits into your body of work, considering it’s such a department from I Love You So Much I Could Die at New York Theatre Workshop?
MP: That’s interesting. I wouldn’t consider it a departure at all, really. I feel like the two plays are very much in conversation with each other. They’re both part of larger projects I’m considering right now, which is an interest in theatrical ventriloquism, where one voice is given to another voice. Or maybe, I think of it as work with avatars. I’m interested in autobiography and autofiction, but I don’t know that I would write about my own life so directly if I didn’t have a formal conceit that transcends me taking material from my life. I used a conceit in similar ways with both of these shows in a similar way. With I Love You So Much I Could Die, my back was to the audience, and Microsoft David was reading stories that were written in the first person. You come to realize at the end of the first story that the first person is me: that woman up there with their back to them. The intention for that was to be a faceless avatar for people to project their own life experiences onto. I really wanted other people to have this simple thing to look at that would hopefully become a complex thing to think about. I feel like there are big similarities between that intention and the intentions with the Greenspan play, where sometimes David is speaking directly in first person as me from my desk, the very desk I’m sitting at now, to talk to you!
EB: Oh wow! Is your coffee hot or cold?
MP: [Laughs]. I’ve just got water now because I’ve had my caffeine for the day. I have two cups every morning, so I’m sticking to water. But I think there are huge similarities between the two, and it’s sort of a funny coincidence that tickles me that these two avatars I fell in love with are both named David. I sort of think of these, in my mind, as the David plays.
EB: Was the name Microsoft David inspired by David Greenspan, or was that a coincidence?
MP: Just a coincidence! Microsoft David is a text-to-speech tool that anyone who has Microsoft can use. Maybe not anymore, I think his voice is no longer on the most up-to-date programs, but it’s an accessibility tool that anyone could use to read text aloud. I grew very attached to this tool during a time when I was very grief-stricken and was somehow comforted by his really dry delivery. His personality sort of emerged without ever emoting, but through rhythm only. That was a very therapeutic actor, or non-actor, to work with at that time.
EB: I was reading about a play you wrote for EST some years ago called Offshore Clinical Trials, where you discussed how you’re really interested in long periods of research as part of your development process. Is that typically your process for a new play idea? Similarly, have you always been interested in a sonic component and the idea of a voice and the voice as a symbol?
MP: That was an old Sloan Institute play about herpes. It’s funny you should bring up Offshore when we’re discussing departures. I feel and felt a huge personal shift in my writing pre and post 2020, and I feel I’ve now sort of landed in the voice I’d been circling around for a very long time. There’s a play I wrote called Private that went up in 2022 in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Iowa, which was a seven-scene realism speculative fiction play, and then Offshore Clinical Trials was heavily researched and an attempt at naturalism, which is funny. While I love naturalism, I’m really not interested in writing it myself. Those two plays were very much of a certain time. I kind of feel like I was ten people ago when I wrote those two plays and then I sort of hit this area after I did this radio play for EST in 2020, and that was the first time I worked with Microsoft David, and from that period on, I became very interested in voice. I don’t know that that was always my primary interest, but in the past five years, I’ve been really interested in avatars and the theatrical ventriloquism idea: of having one voice represent another or a multiplicity of voices be represented by one. I’m really interested in the idea of splintering an identity.
EB: One of the most touching moments of David Greenspan is how you’re able to insert the experience of your sister’s illness so seamlessly without it being the primary concern of the play. How did you handle the sensitivity of this secondary story in such a highly animated play with a highly animated actor?
MP: I wrote I Love You So Much I Could Die and David Greenspan within two years of each other, and I had certain things on my mind that are now three years old. It’s so funny how that happens. You write a play, and I feel this– inception of this play to production–happened in a flash, but a flash in theater is like three years. There were things I was thinking about back then that were a response not just to global events, but my own life, and I couldn’t separate the two. To watch David Greenspan, this man with these incredible, unique, alien-like capabilities– I often say it’s like he’s from his own planet– be able to express to others what he meant to me, I couldn’t take it out of the time and context in which I encountered him: a time when I was not only depressed about the state of theatre, but depressed in general about the trials of life and the things that make it beautiful and feel worthwhile. While I was shy to write about myself again, which is funny because a lot of my heroes–Sarah Manguso, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Sigrid Nunez–do, and I don’t judge them for it at all. I felt uncomfortable writing about myself again, but I did it because I am moved by specificity. Nothing bums me out more than a play that could’ve been written by ChatGPT. There was something about the highly specific man named David Greenspan standing in as a symbol for what matters about theatre, and I think that I had to have the person who loves him be as highly specific as me, which meant being as specific about my life and its given circumstances.
EB: I’ve seen David Greenspan perform before, and I share in your reverence for him. He’s almost the Gene Kelly of off-Broadway. When thinking about the play and writing the play, did you “account” for this physicality, or is that more a virtue of the staging?
MP: I would say both, but mostly David and our director, Ken [Rus Schmoll]. There were moments when I expected him to do what I knew he could do. I’d never quite seen him do something quite like this before, really terse, contemporary dialogue, and I figured he would do something that would be virtuosic that would bring the audience pleasure right away. I’m thinking about how on the page, the moments where the characters greet each other– “Hi Mona!” “Hi Emy!” They hug, they kiss, “Come in, darling”– I was picturing him, even in more mundane moments, adding physicality to it. The possibility of this made me laugh while I was writing it. I was also thinking of the moment where Mona recounts seeing The Patsy, and she says she can’t describe it and that she has to do it, and then feeling embarrassed in her attempts because she’s not David Greenspan. I imagined having a lot of fun with David, having me talk about him recreating this moment that he did so beautifully, that burns so bright in my memory, and then having him undercut that beautiful moment by saying he can’t do it. A lot of it was in the script, but then a lot of the choices, I would say most of the choices, are David doing his own thing.
EB: The one moment where he turns his one leg in and almost looks like a pin-up girl.
MP: Yeah [Laughs]! That’s all him. That’s all him! There were times he would just do things that were so strange that so exceeded my expectations. Oftentimes, I felt satisfied because he was doing exactly what I had fantasized, and other times I was satisfied because he exceeded my wildest guesses.
EB: While the play covers how this project came to be, you’re seeing The Patsy and being enamored, how did the process of this play come to be? What were the early conversations with David Greenspan like?
MP: Some ideas you can trace and some you can’t unmake like a soup, and this was one of those, where I can’t really remember how I came up with that idea. But I do remember running with it and drafting it and every step making its way towards him. I remember being in the car with my mom in Florida– a true moment that’s in the play– and discussing how I had this idea, and speaking about how it wouldn’t work, and being uncertain about his involvement. I remember telling her pretty quickly after seeing The Patsy that I had this idea, that I wanted to write a play for David Greenspan. I think at the time, too, I had a lot of thoughts that were in this mental file cabinet I was titling “An Audit on Theatre”, but I never would have written a play that was just four women talking about a theatre without this huge theatrical conceit, because I didn’t think it would be pleasurable enough or insightful enough, even if the subject matter interested me. When I had the idea, which must have also come from being obsessed with David and reading everything about David and reading David speak frankly about the finances of theatre and what it’s cost him to live while working in theatre, which I had also been thinking about and was somewhat shocked to hear him speak on, given his career. I realized there was something kindred there, with all of us theatre people. I think the two ideas merged and clicked, and it became a reaction, and I ran with it.
EB: It’s unsurprising to me that he said yes because the material is really the perfect sort of laboratory for the Greenspan approach, but what would have happened had he said no?
MP: Then, truly, the play could have never happened. That line is even in the play– “Then the play could never be done”– and it’s true. The play would have died, and I would’ve been so sad, but I would’ve scrapped the play for parts, and who knows what they would’ve become.
EB: The economics of art-making is always in the mind of the artist, even more so now. Was this another topic you reckoned with post-2020, or had this always weighed on you?
MP: I think always, but it was exacerbated by 2020, which is probably how we all felt. We all knew that managing a nonprofit is managing a loss, but now they certainly know. We also know that we don’t get paid well, and know that even more so now, of course. Getting paid was such a pipe dream. I didn’t have my first professional production until post-2020, so that’s a difference too. There was no expectation that I would make a living doing theatre, and there was no expectation that I’d be able to do it at all. When I got my first professional production in Washington, D.C. in 2022, that’s when I started leaving the phase of applying to hundreds of opportunities and wondering if anyone would ever even read my script, before I could even think about being paid, so it was always on my mind. But, I wasn’t participating in the same way as I have been in only the past couple of years.
EB: Having seen On Set with Theda Bara, I know Greenspan is comfortable with material that isn’t necessarily of his generation, references to Tik Tok for instance. Were there ever moments of inaccessibility during your rehearsal process where he didn’t understand a reference in the script?
MP: Oh yeah, and it cracks me up. David and I have become, and this is the thing I’m probably most proud of, very dear friends. I can’t believe that only a couple of years ago, I wondered if he would think I was this total psycho delivering a manifesto to him, and now we’re friends! He just turned 69 a couple of weeks ago, and I took him out for a glass of wine. I love him! But anyway, he tickles me so much. He didn’t know who Miley Cyrus was. There’s a line in the play about Miley Cyrus and Peacock, the streaming platform, but he didn’t know who that was so I showed him the music video for Wrecking Ball, which he watched in silence and then he said “Now let’s watch something that I like” and he pulled up a video of Barbra Streisand from 1979 or something and we watched Barbra. He wasn’t the biggest fan of Miley, but now he knows who she is.
EB: Can you go into more details about the first meeting with David Greenspan?
MP: I knew Ken Rus Schmoll would be the director of my dreams for this because he’s brilliant, and also, he has a long, trusting relationship with David. I had only met Ken once briefly at a Clubbed Thumb production one time, but he had directed my husband’s [playwright Lucas Hnath] first professional production of Death Tax at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Ken has since directed a few more of Lucas’ plays like Hillary and Clinton, so Lucas made the introduction and I wrote to Ken and asked if he thought if it would be appropriate for David to do, and if he thought so maybe he could make the introduction so it came from a trusted person. Ken loved the play, which was such a confident boost because, for a while, I didn’t know if I had anything as the play was so reliant on execution, and it could only be executed by one person whom I had never met. When Ken said he thought it could work, he sent it to David and David’s husband Bill read it first and said it was funny and that David should read it and David did and agreed to a reading, and we got together in The Atlantic rehearsal room before they had any commitment to the play, they just let me use a rehearsal room of the school, and it was so interesting. There were times that were so tense. I could not believe that I had asked him to say these things about himself, and I was really red and blushing and mortified, and then there were moments that I was trying not to cry because I was so moved that he was in this room with me. After that, we took a water break and Ken and I– we’ve become very close, we’re a little triumvirate, me, Ken, and David– turned to each other, tearing up, discussing how beautiful the experience was, and wondering what David would say. We had a conversation with David about what it would mean for him to say these things about himself and if he felt comfortable doing it, but I didn’t think he’d be able to really think about those things in that moment, so I offered to give David some time to think about whether he was interested in working on the project but he immediately said yes to working on it. We all thought that his agreeing meant we would proceed by organizing a workshop, but pretty immediately after David agreed, The Atlantic scooped up the play and programmed it. Our next conversation was me telling David how The Atlantic wanted to do the play. It went from zero to one hundred. So he committed to something he thought he’d have more time to work on, but it immediately came into fruition.
EB: How did he react to that immediate progression?
MP: I think he was shocked! But he’s so happy, and we’re so happy with the play that any doubts along the way have been smoothed over, and those doubts come from genuine risk. This is a project that could’ve failed in so many ways and kind of shouldn’t work, and it does. It does! We’re very proud.
EB: How do you deal with the meta element of this play? Have you had conversations with David about the distance that’s created?
MP: David is comfortable doing it because he completely disappears. I do like to, in my plays, or the recent plays, provide a good amount of negative space where I’m asking the audience to do a little bit more work, but there are moments in the play that I forget myself. Ken and I had a funny moment at the beginning of the process where we were thinking about costumes and how we were going to have to get three different costumes for these three women, and then we remembered it’s one man doing the whole thing. We have these moments of confusion because of how vividly David becomes three people and then four people on stage. David is both completely present, but also he becomes invisible, and he is Mona and Sierra, and Emy. I think he ended up in a place where he was comfortable hero-worshipping David Greenspan because it’s not David Greenspan hero-worshipping, it’s David Greenspan disappearing into Mona so committedly that it’s not about him, it’s about me being obsessed with him, but he doesn’t comment on it. He doesn’t blink. He resists the very tempting urge to wink. As for me… I mean, there are times it has been very uncomfortable. It’s difficult to leave the privacy of the page. There’s a sort of tyranny of the narrative that often makes for the most complex moments, and if I am the casualty of that, it’s fine. I think of the moments where Mona is put on blast. Every character is allowed to be wrong, and there are times when Mona is wrong, or oblivious, or limited in her scope of the way she talks about something. I know that’s what makes the play work, so that was never too much of a question, writing about it, and being up there in previews and watching the audience watch me put my inner saboteur on stage. Sometimes I’m blushing in the back, but I stand by how it holds the play up and makes the play work. I try to really see the separation at work.
EB: I read in the New York Times review, which was rightfully glowing, that a lot of the competition represented in the dynamic of the three and four characters is exaggerated. I imagine that some of the dynamics not being totally “truthful” allows for that feeling of remove as well. Would you say that’s accurate?
MP: Totally. The character called Mona is recognizably me in so many ways, and the numbers I share are real numbers because I think it’s a service. I think it’s really important for artists to share how much we make so that expectations are in the right place and we can budget, subsidize, and leverage accordingly, and I think talking about money is important. But everything else, like I say in the prologue, is exaggerated. It’s not like Sierra or Emy are friends of mine. There are qualities that I’ve taken from people, and anecdotes that I’ve taken with the consent of some friends and then put them in the mouths of the characters, but there is no one-to-one equivalency except for the parts of Mona that are clearly… Mona.
EB: So the strike.
MP: Oh yeah.
EB: It’s kind of insane. This play has an incredible illuminating insight about artmaking that becomes a part of the art. What was the experience of the strike, and how did you make sense of it?
MP: Yeah, it was really strange, because it’s a play about how the work of art is hard to do, and then the work of art was hard to do! It was a very disorienting two months. I was never too worried that the play wouldn’t come back; I thought it was a matter of time, but the uncertainty was very difficult, and really the adrenal shift was hard. There’s a certain order of operations that even when it goes in the right order– rehearsals to tech to previews to opening to being subject for public debate– though very exciting, is still high adrenaline and tough to handle. There’s so much more I could say about the conversations in the play that are distilled down to something clear and polemic, so it can be clear because it’s an argument-based play, and it’s a big lift to ask people to follow it when David is playing three people. There are parts of conversations that could be longer, but I wanted it to be lean and direct, intentionally. This was all on my mind during those two months, and then there was even more to say in the play about the economics of art, but I kept it as is, in the shape that it was in when I initially wrote it. I think I started writing this play in 2021 or 2022, but it was also before the strike that changed everything for Hollywood. When my friends were feeling much more optimistic about TV, and now these characters are ironically existing before the writer’s strike that would’ve changed Sierra’s life for sure. But I keep it as an artifact of the period it was written in. So, the strike was hard for the adrenaline shift, but once it came back, it was even more precious and accumulated a deeper meaning in some ways. Some of the lines felt even more urgent.
EB: This play is so much about theater and so much about New York theatre. What do you think someone who isn’t as well-versed in the world may get out of it?
MP: I’ve heard the play referenced many times as inside baseball, which is fair. I stand by it because, like I said at the beginning of the conversation, I’m very tickled and moved by specificity. There have been people I have invited who aren’t theatre people, but they’ve told me how enjoyable it was without understanding every reference. They were still able to find a point of connection. Everybody knows what it is to struggle under capitalism, and the play is in large part about how to make a living doing what you love, or if that should even be the metric at all. Perhaps it’s childish to prioritize doing what you love. What is valued and supported, and what’s not, which extends beyond the arts, to so many kinds of work. I hope that it isn’t too prohibitive and that non-theatre people come, but I’m also totally ok with making something that’s a highly specific love letter.
EB: Did you ever think of getting into TV writing?
MP: LOL! Of course, I would want to, but the question is, could I get that job? I don’t know! I have not actively worked on that. That’s another part of the play that’s absolutely true, where I saw all my friends pivoting to pilots, and I can’t stop thinking in plays. But I love TV! TV is awesome. I hope that the play never seems like that super boring old idea of theatre being for the auteur, and TV being less artistically significant. No! TV is awesome, and I look forward to watching it every single day.
EB: What are some of your favorite shows?
MP: My favorite shows are Love on the Spectrum and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Reality TV gives my brain a break from scripted narrative. But as far as scripted stuff, I – like everybody else – love White Lotus. And I thought Adolescence was a masterpiece.
EB: Do you think you’ll make another piece of a David Greenspan nature?
MP: That is the question. That is the question!
EB: That’s a perfect response. I love it!
MP: [Laughs].
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