"ART" Not About Art, at Root

Johanna Ettin and Shauna Shames
New Rep Reviewers

'ART', the witty and stylish production now on stage at New Rep, is a terrific post-holiday theatrical event choice. It is bold, funny, unsentimental, and at times deeply poignant. Perhaps we could call it a black comedy whose clever humor masks an underlying seriousness.

'ART' isn’t really about art. Oh, various esthetic notions are mulled (and fought) over in the course of the play. And the central painting becomes something of a fourth character. But what it’s really about is the nature of friendship, its strength and its fragility, and the underground streams of meaning, affection and ego that sustain it. It is a riveting evening, beautifully set, lighted and directed. The actors, all veterans of the Boston theater scene, are simply superb.

Serge, a prosperous plastic surgeon with a developing interest in modern art, has just purchased a painting by the artist of the moment from a prestigious gallery. The canvas, roughly three feet by four feet, is all white. Serge displays his new acquisition with eagerness and pride to his old friend Marc, practically dancing on his toes as he waits for Marc’s appreciation and envy. Marc has a veritable intellectual fit and seems unduly angry, concerned about Serge’s welfare and perhaps his sanity. He shares his concern with their mutual friend, the easy-going and sweet-natured Yvan, who quickly becomes the monkey-in-the-middle between the two battling alpha-males.

We can’t help but sympathize with both Marc and Serge.  Serge's delight in the painting -- and in his ownership of it -- comes across beautifully, making Marc's cutting disapproval tough to watch.  At the same time, we gradually learn that Marc's concern and outrage has little to do with the painting itself, and everything to do with what the painting symbolizes about the new direction of Serge's life.  Marc finally reveals how upset he is to be losing his oldest friend to this new world of "deconstructionist" art (which Marc detests). The argument becomes more and more heated with Serge and Marc saying unforgivable things to and about each other (think: the older couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but with two men fighting about a friendship, not a marriage -- although it feels quite marital by the end). Poor Yvan, caught in the middle, tries to mediate and revive the bonhomie, only succeeding in diverting venom to himself. Tension builds to a peak moment which is shocking, but oddly sweet.

Robert Pemberton as Marc, Robert Walsh as Serge, and Doug Lockwood as Yvan disappear completely into the characters they portray. The play bristles with ideas and words, but several of the best and funniest moments of the evening came in silence -- or, rather, in the space between lines.

The director constantly added subtle touches to the play, adding a depth that perhaps it doesn’t inherently possess. Yasmina Reza is clearly the playwright of the moment with her Gods of Carnage playing elsewhere in town and Carnage, the Polanski movie based on that play, showing in local theaters. She certainly has a way with sharp, sophisticated dialog and gives it the sense of excitement and danger that keep the audience on edge, as if watching a swordfight instead of an esthetic disagreement among three middle-aged and rather pretentious men. But then, as we said before, that’s not really what it’s all about.