Bear Stearns’s Ace Greenberg Gets the Off-Broadway Treatment
Illustration: Cynthia Kittler
In 2013, Alan “Ace” Greenberg was dying. The former chairman of Bear Stearns Cos. had been diagnosed with cancer, and “I had a limited amount of time to find out how my dad thought and operated,” says Ted Greenberg. “So when it looked like he might not have that much time left, I told him that there was some stuff I wanted to know.”
He went through his father’s files and archives and, over the course of multiple discussions, probed his dad about lingering, decades-old questions. A stand-up comic who formerly wrote for Late Night With David Letterman, Greenberg turned what he learned into a play, Ace. The one-man show is set in the late 1980s—when, in an act of post-adolescent rebellion, the younger Greenberg was driving a cab and living in relative squalor in New York’s East Village. In an Oedipal turn that clearly hasn’t escaped him, Ace necessitates that Greenberg play both his father and himself, a dichotomy he pulls off by alternating voice, mannerism, and accent.