The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan

Series

• Critical Performances

Playwright and actor David Greenspan has been a leading figure in Manhattan's downtown performance scene for over twenty years. His numerous accolades include a Guggenheim fellowship and four Obie Awards for his acting and writing, and most recently a fifth Obie for Sustained Achievement. Tony Kushner once declared Greenspan "probably all-around the most talented theater artist of my generation," and the New York Times has called his performances "irresistible." The Myopia and Other Plays brings together five of Greenspan's most important works, accompanied by a critical introduction and new interview with the playwright.

Greenspan's work—often semiautobiographical, always psychologically intense—deals with issues of memory, family, doubt, and sexuality. The plays in this collection take particular interest in the motivations for erotic and aesthetic expression, forces inextricably linked in Greenspan's world. Critic and scholar Marc Robinson's informative introduction and lively interview with Greenspan further increase the collection's appeal to lovers of inventive playwriting, as well as students and scholars in the fields of Performance Studies, English, American Studies, and LGBT Studies.

Photo © Aaron Epstein

David Greenspan is an award-winning actor and playwright whose work has been produced across the United States and in Europe. 

Marc Robinson is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at Yale University. He is a frequent contributor to the Village Voice, the New Republic, New York Newsday, and The New York Times.

Praise / Awards

• "In his wonderful preface to David Greenspan's "The Myopia and Other Plays," Marc Robinson writes that it may be perverse to approach Greenspan as a "mannerist actor and often baroque writer."
  —Hilton Als, The New Yorker

• "He is our most elegant metatheatrixer; in his hands, the lines between on- and offstage reality melt like butter, re-form as steel, then wisp away again in a breath."
  —Anne Washburn, BOMB

• "Marc Robinson's introduction to The Myopia and Other Plays, the strongest and most wide-ranging assessment of Greenspan's work yet composed, considers the limits of Greenspan's practice and theatricalized flux."
  —Jason Fitzgerald, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

• Winner, Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Drama, 2013