Terrific acting and superb direction still can't make Yasmina Reza's Art, currently playing at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, more than a well-written trifle, a pleasant sitcom with intellectual pretensions. So yes it's delightful to see Brian Shea, Paul Potenza and Ned Averill-Snell exercise their considerable talents on Patricia J. England's beautiful living room set. And yes, director Wendy Leigh moves these actors around the stage with deft comic energy and psychological accuracy. But, for all its verbal elegance and emotional variety, this is a play with very little to say, full of sound and fury and signifying next to nothing. As to why Art has been such a success in Paris, London and the U.S., well, I have my own theory, which I'll get to in a minute. For the moment, let's just say this is a play that doesn't take contemporary art — or contemporary intellect — very seriously, and depends on a similar skepticism from its audience.
The key to Art is the relationship of three friends, Serge (Shea), Ivan (Potenza) and Marc (Averill-Snell). More to the point, the play is about an all-white painting that Serge buys for $40,000, and the effect that this purchase has on his relationship with Marc and Ivan. Marc, who considers himself Serge's mentor, is upset with his friend for wasting, as he sees it, so much money on a meaningless work of charlatanism. Ivan, who styles himself as a peacemaker, finds something likable in the white painting and refuses to agree with Marc that the thing is just "shit." And Serge, trying to remain above it all, insists on the artistic legitimacy of the monochromatic canvas, just as he insists on the modern relevance of the philosopher Seneca or the usefulness of the word "deconstruction." For an hour and a half, the three friends bicker with, shout at and deride one another and then finally, when their relationship is at the breaking point, someone takes action, surprisingly, and the play is over.
Have we learned anything about art? Not a thing, aside from its capacity to divide its audience. Have we learned something about friendship? Yes, about these three men's friendship, anyway. As for Friendship itself — well, Reza no more examines that than she does Seneca or deconstruction.
But we have enjoyed some splendid acting, and that's reason enough to be glad of this production. There's no one actor who stands out here — all three play their parts flawlessly, moving from repartee to audience asides and back with grace and speed. Shea as Serge is the most quietly thoughtful of the three, a budding connoisseur who's more than a little pleased with himself for having bought the white painting. He's searching for elegant ways to simplify his life, and honestly expects his buddies to take as much joy in his discoveries as he does himself.
Potenza as Ivan is something else altogether, a neurotic mess who hates conflict, feels overwhelmed by life and has a desperate need to verbalize the chaos that he finds everywhere, in everyone. And Averill-Snell as Marc is a smug, contemptuous scoffer, wounded when he finds his former protege showing a mind of his own, and sure that honest men everywhere must see and feel things as he does. Thanks to Leigh's fine directing, these three actors utterly dominate the stage, winning our attention at the first moment and not letting go till the final curtain.
England's sharply modern living room set is one of the most attractive I've ever seen in the Shimberg space. Add Rick Criswell's typically wonderful costumes — shades of beige for Serge and Marc, a tellingly different gray for habitual outsider Ivan — and you've got production values as first-class as any you'll find in American regional theater.
But oh, the script — that disappointingly shallow script. Well, I said I had a theory about its success, and here, for the record, it is. Art is a play for those who don't like or understand modern painting, and who want to be told that their ignorance is, in fact, an act of the higher criticism.
Their number must be large — people who suspect that Kandinsky and Mondrian, Rothko and Pollock were really just frauds, men who couldn't paint a portrait and who disguised their inadequacies with splotches or squares of color that they then called "abstract." The emperor has no clothes, you see, and you, brilliant you, saw it first, saw it best. And now here come Serge, Marc and Ivan to hash it out until that climactic moment when modern painting is finally revealed as a long-running confidence game, a scam, a cheat, a hoax, a swindle.
The secret of its success?
Art is a feel-good play for philistines.
Three Times Chekhov. The three one-acts that make up Chekhov Chekhov & Chekonte, currently playing at Gorilla Theatre, are too short to make a strong impression, and too allusive to prevent us from wishing for the Master at full-length.
Best of all is the third play, Swan Song, in which Ron Sommer plays an aging actor who wakes up in a theater late at night, and Michael George Owens is the prompter who reluctantly agrees to play some lines of Shakespeare with him. This short piece is really Chekhov's tribute to Shakespeare, and thanks to Sommer and Owens' fine acting, we can enjoy a brief tour through the Russian playwright's favorite bits of Lear, Hamlet and Richard II.
But Owens' Professor Nyukhin in The Evils of Tobacco is too simple and farcical, never reaching the emotional truth of his character's self-hatred; and Sommer, Jon Van Middlesworth and Emily Burrell in The Marriage Proposal are all surface, without the contradictions that would make their oscillations credible.
Aubrey Hampton's direction is adequate if uninspired — a phrase that also applies to sets and costumes.
This is not a production to convince you of Chekhov's greatness, so if you don't know much about the playwright, hold out for the next Cherry Orchard or Uncle Vanya. If you're a confirmed Chekhovian, on the other hand, well, even a bland Anton is better than no Anton at all.
But proceed with caution.
This article appears in Apr 24-30, 2002.