Theater Review—

What Is ‘Art’?

By Julie Stern

NEW MILFORD — Art is an award-winning play (Tony in New York, Olivier in London, and Moliere in Paris, where it premiered) by an award-winning playwright (Yasmina Reza) who has garnered numerous citations for her works which seem to have been produced (according to the notes in the playbill) just about everywhere in the civilized world.

Now Art it is being staged at the ambitious TheatreWorks New Milford, which has dipped into its stable of highly competent actors and directors, along with a set by the truly gifted artistic director Bill Hughes.

So what can I say? Watching it the other night, my mind kept drifting to that Goldie Hawn movie, Private Benjamin, and in particular, to that suave, two-timing French doctor whom the heroine gets engaged to but has the sense, at the last minute, not to marry. If you were to take that character with all his obnoxious arrogance and divide him in three, you would have the entire cast of Art – an ostensible comedy about three buddies whose friendship founders when one of them spends an unconscionable amount of money to buy a pretentious modern painting consisting of a white canvas traversed by a couple of white lines.

At a time when French bashing is becoming popular, I don’t mean to indulge in ethnic slurs. However, I think that there is a culture gap which divides our countries here in that the nature of “friendship” as portrayed in the play is too barbed and supercilious to make sense to a homegrown audience.

The play revolves around a trio of Parisians. Serge, a dermatologist, and Marc, an aeronautical engineer, are young, upper-middle class bachelors. Yvan is a ploddingly unsuccessful salesman, about to marry into a wealthy family of wholesale stationery dealers. The hapless straight man for their needling, anxiety-ridden Yvan is the simplest and most amiable of the three; he brushes off their teasing, confident that as his best friends, they will be witnesses and sign his marriage documents.

All of their encounters are dominated by the tension that radiates between Marc and Serge: Serge has paid $30,000 for this extremely unimpressive work of “art” because it is by a fashionable modern painter, and so represents for him, a step up the cultural ladder.

Marc is hostile and contemptuous. What emerges is that he feels this is an act of betrayal, a sign that Serge is abandoning him as cultural and intellectual mentor in order to ingratiate himself with the trendy Parisian art world. When the two of them aren’t sniping at each other, they join forces to attack and belittle Yvan – for his niceness, his neediness and his naïveté.

As a teenager I once saw an exhibit at MoMA in New York City, of a set of canvasses painted entirely in monochromatic black. They were roped off so that you couldn’t get within three feet of them, and on the wall was posted an explanatory notice saying that “for some reason, museum patrons had demonstrated inexplicable hostility toward these pictures, and had even tried to deface them with white chalk.”

Art closes with a similar kind of sight gag involving a blue felt tip pen.

Steve Manzino, Eric A. Olsen and Stephen Sedlak do a creditable job of playing their roles, with Mr Sedlak particularly good as Yvan. In the end, though, that old platitude about not knowing much about art but knowing what you don’t like, applies here.

Performances continue through March 22, each Friday and Saturday at 8 pm. There is also a matinee this Sunday (March 9) at 2:30 pm. All seats are $15. Details, 860-350-6863.