A disorderly life is viewed through an aptly fragmenting (if frustrating) lens in “I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees,” a new play written by and starring David Greenspan that opened on Sunday at Abrons Arts Center. Mr. Greenspan’s elliptical drama for three actors explores the life of the title character, a movie star of early talkies played by Brooke Bloom, as her career briefly peaks then heads south, and a tempestuous early marriage withers.
Mr. Greenspan plays Mike, a 16-year-old from Los Angeles who treks across the country by bus in search of his idol. She’s starring as Blanche DuBois in a summer stock production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But in an early monologue that sets the play’s disorienting tone, Mr. Greenspan conflates Mike’s story with what appears to be his own.
“I was born in Los Angeles in 1956,” he says. “And I traveled in the summer of 1951 to Sea Cliff, Long Island — at the age of 16.” He then continues: “I was born in 1935. And at the age of 16, in 1972, I was looking out a window opening out on a rolling lawn.”
Mr. Greenspan was in fact born in Los Angeles in 1956, but neither he nor Mike really figures prominently in the story that unfolds, which is, as it happens, enacted on a lush green (fake) lawn spread across the stage. The audience sits on the stage, too, watching the play from a kind of reverse angle, with a view of the empty auditorium as a haunting backdrop.
Skittering back and forth in time, the play jumps from Mike’s arrival in Sea Cliff, where he’s welcomed by locals who invite him to join them for dinner (all the ancillary roles are played by Mr. Greenspan), back to the early romance between Helen Jurgens and Clark Twelvetrees (Keith Nobbs), both aspiring actors, although Clark doesn’t get many roles and makes a living as a stage manager. Then it leaps forward several years, where we find a belligerent Clark, now divorced from Helen, getting into a drunken squabble with his new girlfriend, Ann.
Suddenly this scene evaporates, or rather zigzags, back into the past, as Helen, married to Clark, prepares to leave New York and the theater for Hollywood, where the new talkies are upending the business and making trouble for foreign-born stars. Then it’s back to the future, where Clark confronts Helen’s second husband, a sometime actor and real estate developer named Jack Woody, inciting another drunken brawl. Some passages are repeated with variations, like recurring memories, and at times the characters address the audience directly.
Keeping track of who’s who and what’s what makes for a continual challenge, particularly because Mr. Greenspan takes on so many roles, sometimes portraying two characters addressing each other. The disjointed structure also keeps us from getting intimate glimpses of its central characters, since we rarely witness sustained interaction between them.
Among the more notable dramatic incidents is the apparent suicide attempt made by Clark just as Helen is preparing to head west. He jumped, or perhaps fell — or as scandalmongers suggested, was pushed — out of their seventh-floor window, luckily landing on a window awning (or on the roof of a convertible). This traumatic incident, and Clark’s affection for, and onetime seduction of, a gay roommate named Steven are threads woven frequently into the play. (In that drunken fight, Ann intimates that Clark thinks of Steven when she is in bed with him.)
If there’s not a whole lot that the director, Leigh Silverman, can do to bring order to the jumbled jigsaw puzzle of the text, she does elicit strong performances.
Mr. Greenspan variegates his voice deftly. He employs his trademark silken croon for narration as well as for some of the female characters, who include the actress playing Eunice in “Streetcar,” who tells us that a life-bruised Helen had “the saddest eyes that I’d ever seen.” A more gruff tone is used for, say, the fellow who roughs up Clark, ultimately precipitating his death. He’s also convincing as the naïve Mike.
Ms. Bloom moves from a bright-eyed ambition in the scenes set during the early days of her career, when Hollywood beckoned, to a more world-weary resignation after her movie roles dry up, and she returns east to work in stock. Nevertheless, her Helen retains a flirtatious sexuality that she uses to charm herself into two more marriages after her divorce from Clark.
And Mr. Nobbs is also excellent as the moody, frustrated Clark. Plagued by persistent alcoholism, he quickly gains the embittered aspect of a man whose life’s path took a wrong turn early on, and who unleashed his anger on everyone in his orbit.
The play culminates in a movingly drawn encounter between Helen and Mike, although it apparently takes place in some celestial otherworld because both are looking back on their meeting. And it seems to be Mr. Greenspan himself speaking when he recalls being touched by photos of Helen in the role of Blanche “in this little long-gone, long-ago-forgotten theater.” He continues, “And I wanted to think that despite all the chaos and disappointment, that in this neglected corner of time, you had done something of great beauty.”
This scene has a melancholy lyricism that captivates, but the play’s unwieldy, unmoored structure tends to obscure what Mr. Greenspan intends to illuminate about the life of the title character. The overall effect is of watching a movie with the reels all mixed up.
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