ART
By Yasmina Reza Three men and a painting. Sounds so simple. Not so when one buys an expensive painting that his best friend can't comprehend. When a third friend tries to make it work out, quarrels break out and the trio is forced to look beyond the surface...of art...of friendship. A brilliant, sparking comedy cloaked in a passionate and profound story. 
"Art" attack: Friends and foes - Eric Hissom, Philip Nolen,
Michael Carleton (photo: Jessica Thomas)
REVIEWSRight frame of mind
By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic
Posted January 17, 2001
Look for reasons three guys shouldn't be friends and you can come up with plenty. Serge is pompous. Ivan is nuts. Marc is so filled with aggression that he wears his red shirt like a flag you would wave at a bull.
It's the reasons these guys should be friends that are harder to come by - ambiguous, imprecise, like the whitish lines on the all-white painting that sends them over the brink. Art is as ambiguous as its title yet as eloquent as art can be. In the hands of the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival, it's a play to make everybody happy - those who are screaming with laughter and those who, much later, find the play turning itself over and over in their minds.
Art appeals to all of the senses, thanks to this beautifully staged production, directed with insight by Aaron Posner and acted with consummate craft by Philip Nolen, Eric Hissom and Michael Carleton. After two fall shows chosen solely to appeal to the gut, Art appears at the Shakespeare Festival like a much-needed gift - a comedy that involves both head and heart.
First performed in Paris in 1995, actor-playwright Yasmina Reza's play has scooped up prizes and has been ever more widely produced, from London to New York to regional theaters across the United States this season. In Christopher Hampton's translation, it's not hard to see why. Reza's three characters are guys everybody knows. Serge is a well-off doctor, a dermatologist, who has become a little too adept at telling his friends what to think and whom to read. Marc takes a little too much pleasure in saying exactly what he means. And Ivan, a guy who has never gotten himself together, tries a little too hard to get along with everybody, and thereby manages to make everybody mad.
At the festival's little Goldman Theater, these three guys inhabit a nearly all-white world, cleverly designed by Bob Phillips to transform itself in an instant from one man's apartment to the next. Jason Tollefson's generous lighting shifts the focus effortlessly from man to man, and Jack Smith, as ever, has costumed them as if the characters had dressed themselves, from Serge's suspenders and silver bracelet to Marc's red shirttail hanging out.
It's Serge's purchase of an all-white painting for a princely sum that sets these guys off. But in this production it's the characters themselves who are armed to explode. Carleton's sleek Serge radiates self-importance, as if he has read one too many glossy magazines and believes every word, yet when Serge finds his friendships threatened, his hurt and perplexity are there for all to see.
Hissom's overanxious Ivan is a little goofy, a man unaided by years of therapy: When Ivan mentions his upcoming wedding, he lets out a rush of air as if he's practicing relaxation techniques. This Ivan tries so hard to be affable that it's doing him in; when wedding arrangements get to him, Hissom mines every bit of the long, choleric monologue that brings Art to a giddy high.
And Nolen's down-to-earth Marc is an out-and-out delight, a character whose aggressions Nolen turns into wit. This Marc is transparent, looking at the painting with disbelief, and he can't keep the impatience from his face or the sarcasm from his voice. He's a basset hound crossed with a Doberman: You'd want to hug him if you weren't afraid he'd chomp off your arm.
The play is seamless under Posner's direction: The actors' humor is bound so intrinsically to their characters that you feel as if you know them, as if you have known them for years. Art is sly that way. You take to its externals, to its laughter, and then you find yourself mulling over something much deeper - the nature of friendship, say, and how it can fade. In fact, watching this play is like making a friend. With Art, you get more than you expect.
'Art': Prize-winning play is picture perfect
The Orlando Weekly
By Al Krulick
Published 1/18/01
A man has bought a painting, a work of art. It appears to be a white canvas covered with some diagonal white lines and, perhaps, a few hints of color. The man is very proud of his new acquisition. He's delighted at how much he paid for it, how fashionable the artist is and how the painting moves him. In fact, having the painting makes him very happy. In some strange way, it defines who he is or, better yet, who he wishes to be. The man has a best friend who doesn't like the painting. He sees this costly purchase as absurd. He calls it "white shit." The fact that his friend likes the painting so much seems to vulcanize his outrage.
The two friends have a third friend. He doesn't care much about the painting one way or another. Besides, he's got his own hands full dealing with a new job, a fiancée and a $200-per-week psychiatrist bill. And now his two best friends are fighting over a piece of "art" that may or may not be "white." To him, it's much ado about nothing, and he pretty much says whatever the situation requires.
This potent mix of individual aesthetics and uneasy fraternal love is the amusing, somewhat volatile subject matter of "Art," the Tony Award-winning play by Yasmina Reza, now being offered by the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival. It is a witty, sly and mordant comedy of modern manners in which the aforementioned trio gets to test the limits of their friendship in a 90-minute explosion of accusations, recriminations and revelations.
As we witness the three men invade each other's magnetic fields of awareness and self-definition with barbs about art, fealty and the nature of taste, the stage virtually crackles with Reza's electric dialogue. There is so much sub textual energy coursing through the play (under the superb direction of Aaron Posner) that even the disposal of olive pits in an ashtray becomes a battle of power.
In bringing Reza's comedy to life, all three actors deliver precise performances. As Serge, the painting's owner, Michael Carleton brilliantly conveys his character's cocksure enthusiasm for his own points of view, but also his doubts when his friend refuses to share his artistic pleasures.
Philip Nolen turns in his usual stunning performance, this time as the sarcastic maverick Marc, a man who has always prized supercilious condescension above all qualities.
Eric Hissom perfectly conveys his character's doubt and confusion as the pliable and torn Ivan. During a hilarious monologue in which he recounts a tortured series of phone calls he has had over wedding invitations, we watch him completely and comically self-destruct.
"Art" is an intellectually and emotionally satisfying work that probes into the nature of friendship and private values. And it is supremely funny as well. This flawless production does justice to the play's high stature.
|
