David Greenspan portrays four roles in one-man On Set with Theda Bara (photo by Emilio Madrid)
ON SET WITH THEDA BARA
The Brick
579 Metropolitan Ave.
Monday – Saturday through March 16, $25-$89
transportgroup.org
Bushwick-based playwright Joey Merlo became obsessed with Theda Bara after his sisters searched online for his celebrity doppelgänger and it turned out to be the silent film star known as the Vamp. His infatuation led to the one-person genderqueer show On Set with Theda Bara, running at the Brick through March 9. (The play, which Merlo wrote while he was bedridden during his last semester at Brooklyn College, premiered at the 2023 Exponential Festival; Transport Group and Lucille Lortel Theatre have teamed up to present this encore run.)
Bara, whose name is an anagram for “Arab death,” was born Theodosia Burr Goodman in 1885 and died in 1955 at the age of sixty-nine. But in Merlo’s sixty-five-minute play, she is alive and well at 139, living in an upstate mansion. Six-time Obie winner David Greenspan portrays all four characters: Detective Finale; his adopted daughter, Iras; Ulysses, a Tennessee Williams–esque southerner who started playing the organ at screenings of Bara’s films when he was twelve; and the Vamp herself.
Frank J. Oliva’s set features a long, narrow table covered in black cloth, where thirty audience members sit, advised to not place any items on it, including their hands and elbows. At either end is one empty chair where Greenspan occasionally sits, behind each of which is a shadowy mirror. Twenty other patrons are on stools against the brick walls on opposite sides of the table; above the table is a row of low-hanging lamps, and there are two additional creepy lights on the walls. Greenspan wears old-fashioned slacks, a white shirt, and a red vest, vaguely resembling a carnival barker. (The lighting is by Stacey Derosier, with costume by Avery Reed and ominous sound by Brandon Bulls.) It all makes for a kind of eerie noir séance.
The muddled plot is difficult to parse out, so don’t try too hard. The sixteen-year-old Iras is missing, and Finale is determined to find her. She uses the pronouns they/them, which confuses Finale, who is also having a hard time with his husband, Richie. “The evening of February twenty-ninth I knew something was wrong because all I heard was silence,” he says about coming home from work and not hearing Iras “doing her Tick Tocks or giggling with her girlfriends.” His reference to silence being a problem evokes Bara’s career; she appeared in more than forty silent films between 1914 and 1926, but most were destroyed in a 1937 fire, and she never made a sound picture.
Duality is central to On Set with Theda Bara at the Brick (photo by Emilio Madrid)
Ulysses, who was sexually abused as a child, moves in with Theda, a campy vampire queen and modern-day Norma Desmond who enjoys watching videos of herself on YouTube and reading the comments section. “I know I’m a little twisted. I’m a very self-aware person. But sometimes I like to see myself,” she says. “These little clips from my lost films. All that exist of my former self. I look daring and surreal. Who doesn’t like to remember. . . .”
Greenspan, telling stories like Dracula, is mesmerizing in this tour de force, bending and curving his face and his fingers as he switches between roles, each with its own different vocal twang. Director Jack Serio, who has recently helmed intimate versions of Uncle Vanya and The Animal Kingdom for a limited audience, makes full use of the space; Greenspan (Four Saints in Three Acts, Strange Interlude) stops in front of the mirrors, hides against the wall, and glides across the table with a graceful majesty. However, none of that helps distill the raggedy plot.
The play is an enigma, as was Bara herself. “My life is one big lie,” she says in the play. “But so are the movies. . . . The truth is so subjective anyway. What’s wrong with a little lie!” One of cinema’s first sex symbols, she was married to one of her directors for more than thirty years, but they never had children. She was born in Cincinnati but her studio promoted her as being from exotic Egypt, the daughter of an artist and an Arabian princess.
Even her gender identity is debated in the show. “People used to think I looked like a man. I hated those sneering comments. At first. But then I came to enjoy the criticism,” she admits. “Yes, I look like a man! Because men have power! Maybe I am a man! Maybe I’m not. You’re mine now you’re mine. Kiss me, you fool! or was it Kiss me, my fool? I can never remember the line.”
The famous line comes from her 1915 psychological drama A Fool There Was, which can be watched in full on YouTube. It’s a splendid follow-up to On Set with Theda Bara.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]