Set in 60 minutes of gleaming shadow, a lone character speaks a jagged, repetitive poetry from what they believe to be a cave—though in truth, they aren’t entirely sure. Stripped of light, sensation, point of reference, and clear memory, their isolated mind runs at full throttle to ask the ultimate question: when all the ways you know yourself are gone, who are you?

You may rest assured that David Greenspan is doing the David Greenspan thing over at Williamsburg’s favorite little black box. Writer/director Jerry Lieblich’s handed him a dense new monologue, Without Mirrors, which lands squarely on the non-commercial end of off-off-Broadway and really feels like you’re a fly on the wall for an experimental creative process. Lieblich themself was in attendance at our performance, openly opining after the show that something was missing. David also experienced some serious magic-of-live-theater congestion for about the last third of it, which added a rubbernecky curiosity, like, how does a pro handle this? (Pretty gracefully, it turns out—folks were musing about whether it was part of the show.) There are free take-home zines of the script.

Without Mirrors is a solo piece about a person trapped in a (real or imagined) cave, which strips them of the ability to perceive themself. It’s an hour of disorienting meditation on how we incorporate external stimuli into the concept of a self. While it’s too opaque to summarize in a definitive way, I understood much of it to be a dialogue between the internal, a posteriori psyche-behind-the-eyes and the perceptual self-in-the-mirror—our closest companion disappearing with the light. This is, as you might expect, a source of some distress. It’s pretty interesting but not necessarily the kind of show you recommend to your friends because you don’t want them to disown you.

David, of course, is about as skilled as it gets in the specific discipline of playing multiple roles at once, and it’s a delight to see him work in an intimate venue (half-empty to boot). I also really liked Jerry’s staging quite a bit: they light David with indirect spots bounced off mirrors to create a visual allusion on the wall to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Cool stuff.