It doesnt work that way
The reason the graphic lcd bogs down the arduino is that it send every pixel to the display, so for lets say a 8x8 character (no idea what they are in reality) you have to send 8 bytes of data (plus any protocol overhead) per character
A 20x4 you just send the character you wish to display, 1 byte (plus any protocol overhead) per character (ignoring the few re programmable characters tricks)
so the glcd is 8 * the load (very approximately)
So sure you could make it look just like the 20x4 display, but it wouldn't help.