And In This Corner.....'ART'

by Jack Craib, New Rep Reviewer

'ART', New Rep’s latest production, is one of the most frequently performed contemporary works throughout the theatrical world, and it’s easy to see why. Cynics might say that this is because it requires only three actors and a unit set that with minor changes can easily represent three different apartments, but they would be only partly correct. Because the playwright, Yasmina Reza, is also an actress, she has the uncommon knack of being able to create dialogue that seems natural and true to life. Reza, in this work, the 1998 Tony winner as best play (in, it must be said, a very uncompetitive season), shows herself to be an actor’s writer. This comedy of ill manners, not unlike her more recent play, “God of Carnage,” features a small set of characters whose interactions, if a bit exaggerated, often mirror incidents familiar in our everyday lives. Reza herself has stated that she views both plays as tragedies as much as comedies.Unlike “Carnage,” however, this far superior work is not a series of shouting matches, but necessitates more nuanced performances, more intricate and modulated Pinteresque pacing, and more precision in direction.

Fortunately, New Rep has assembled a team that is keenly aware of these expectations. As Serge, a dermatologist whose artistic pretensions may be only skin deep, Robert Walsh is painfully funny as he solicits validation for his recent purchase of a new painting by an artist currently in vogue. The four foot by five feet white monochrome (or is it?) strikes his friend Marc, expertly played by Robert Pemberton, as something of a cruel joke, evoking a truthful if blunt reaction that injures Serge’s vulnerable defenses. The foil for both these verbal combatants is their mutual friend Yvan, hysterically portrayed by Doug Lockwood, as eager to be agreeable as to be accepted. His sheepdog hyperventilated preoccupation with the familial tensions unleashed by the politics and protocols of wedding invitations is alone worth the price of admission. (One can’t help wondering, though, how this bundle of neuroses was ever befriended by these two pseudo sophisticates). Keeping these three characters in orbit is the direction by Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, who knows how to utilize silence and subtlety. Scenic and Lighting Designer Justin Townsend provides a venue that aptly suggests a boxing ring, and Sound Designer David Remedios contributes musical interludes that ably assist several scene transitions.

Ocampo-Guzman has written that although we inherit the family members we have, we get to choose our friends, and the best of them are those who tell us the truth. It may hurt, especially when it involves the very subjective and emotional reactions to creative expression. This brief tale of revolving loyalties and alternating alliances exposes both Reza’s greatest strength and her most glaring weakness as a writer. With pithy wit and economy of words, often with what is withheld as much as with what is said, she clearly can cut straight to the jugular. Her characters, however, border on the stereotypical, perilously close to the world of sitcom. That said, this is still quite an enjoyable ride. Like the controversial piece of art around which the play revolves, 'ART' may be a slight piece of monochromatic minimalism, but its beauty surely lies in the eyes of this beholder.