In Paris, where Yasmina Reza’s witty dissection of taste and culture first appeared in 1994, opinions about contemporary art run strong enough to bring close friendships to crisis. Translated into lively idiomatic English by Christopher Hampton, "Art" has since become an international hit, picking up critical raves, major awards and sold-out houses in London and New York, and now playing to eager audiences in the provinces.
Satirical comedy doesn’t usually travel well, but "Art" has in some respects gained in translation. What was in France a wry commentary on a peculiarly Gallic obsession with aesthetic taste–on which the French lavish as much proprietary passion as they display over food and la langue française–becomes in America a metaphor for the bonds and stresses of friendship. And in Tracy Brigden’s sure-handed production at TheaterWorks, it’s both a comic soufflé and a meaty think- piece.
In a fast-paced, intermissionless 90 minutes, "Art" tests and frays the fifteen-year friendship of three old chums. Serge fancies himself an ahead-of-the-curve art connoisseur and collector. Marc favors representational art and in-your-face confrontation. Yvan is a mediator and peacemaker, with no opinions about art and a strong desire to preserve the status quos of his life.
The fracas that is "Art" turns on a disagreement over a work of art, a plain white-on-white canvas that Serge has purchased for an exorbitant price. In dispute is whether this monochrome painting is an artwork at all and not a meaningless "piece of shit," as Marc instantly dubs it. The pure field of white paint becomes a tabula rasa, a blank slate onto which accusations of pretentiousness and philistinism are projected.
In TheaterWorks’ production, the trio of friends are 30-somethings, younger men than in the play’s original Broadway and West End versions. This gives the characters, and the show, a little more gut energy and makes the script’s slow boil into fraternal strife sometimes feel more like body blows than unkind cuts.
Here, Serge and Marc are a kind of Odd Couple, a Parisian Felix and Oscar with warring, mutually dependent personalities. Kirk Jackson’s Serge is slightly pompous, fastidious in manner and dress; Christopher McCann’s Marc is a little rumpled and more than a little testy, leveling a shoot-from-the-hip sarcasm at anything trendy or precious. The two performers intersect in the bubbly glee each displays, Serge tickled to death by his proud new acquisition and Marc taking spiteful pleasure in needling him about it.
Triangulating the pair–standing actually between them in much of director Bridgen’s staging–is Yvan, a down-to-earth bloke with no pretensions and few ambitions. The topic he gets into a lather over–in Adam Heller’s performance, literally and hilariously–is the maddening in-law and step-parent relationships complicating his upcoming wedding.
In the hands of these good actors, "Art" becomes a battleground where pointed wisecracks are fired indiscriminately, sometimes drawing no more than a laugh from the audience but often wounding through a chink in the combatants’ emotional armor. As the contested territory widens, arty snipes turn to more personal put-downs, especially when the topic becomes the women in each others’ lives. And as the layers of camaraderie peel away, root causes begin to surface–the sometimes selfish foundations of even the closest friendships.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about "Art", at least for an American audience, is that the play is basically guys talking about their relationship. True, much of the dialogue is impudent banter, but this isn’t locker-room jock talk; it’s just as often probing and uncomfortable, three men questioning the nature and dynamics of their friendship–even, wonder of wonders, using the word "love." It’s a measure of the actors’ and director’s skills that this risky exploration is both funny and touching, often at the same time.
John Lasiter’s austere setting is its own metaphor for the action. A white cube surrounding three polished-wood benches, it serves as each of the three men’s apartments but most clearly resembles an art gallery. Scene shifts from Serge’s flat to Marc’s and Yvan’s are signaled by paintings that glow into life in the back wall. Yvan’s world is represented by a clumsy still- life of a bowl of fruit, Marc’s by a Renaissance landscape seen through a trompe-l’oeil window frame. At the very end, Serge’s provocateur of a painting hangs, in ironic triumph, directly between them.