The art of facing the truth
November
21, 2007
By CATEY SULLIVAN
On its sleek surface, Yasmina Reza's "Art" seems as simple as the canvas that serves as the plot's
launching pad. The 90-minute piece starts with Serge, a fellow who has just spent a ridiculous, obscene even, amount of money
on a piece of highly debatable piece of art: an all-white painting that, under just the right light, reveals a few white brush
strokes in the foreground. Serge calls it a modern masterpiece. His old friends Yvan and Marc call it a lot of other things,
none of them complimentary.
The 4-by-5 foot painting becomes the catalyst for a war of words that shakes the threesome's
decades-deep friendship to the core. Because of the attitudes elicited by the beyond-the-pale canvas, each man is forced to
examine more than a few painful truths about his character, his relationships and the compromises he's made along the
sad, inevitable march from youth to middle age.
Rich wit
"There's a richness to this piece, a maturity and a wit that comes
from a story about people who have gone through a fair number of upheavals, challenges and changes in their lives," says
Marc Rita, who plays Serge in TinFish and Blue Heron theater companies' co-production of "Art" opening Nov.
17 at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater.
That richness earned "Art" the Best Play Tony in 1998.
But the rewards of "Art" require an engaged audience that thinks as provocative ideas fly rather than a passive
one that simply gapes as a story unfurls, added director Dejan Avramovich. In addition to the Tony, "Art," originally
written and produced in French, won a slew of major European theater awards, none of them for show-stopping special effects
or facile humor.
"It actually took me a couple of readings to get the full impact," Avramovich admitted.
Yet audiences shouldn't be intimidated: "Art," while bubbling over with sharp and rapid-fire dialogue, is meant
to be seen rather than read. "When I finally saw it, it hit me how funny it was," Avramovich said, "Reza called
it a tragedy, but it's a tragedy with a great deal of wit."
It's not a tragedy in the classic everybody's-dead-or-insane-by-the-final-scene
manner of "Hamlet" or "Oedipus." The sorrow in "Art" creeps up subtly, couched within the zinging,
contentious repartee of its three articulate protagonists.
Turning points
Each
of the men debating the merits -- or lack thereof -- of Serge's white painting is at a crossroads in his life: Serge has
just undergone a bitter divorce. Yvan is about to commit to a marriage that all signs indicate will be an emotional catastrophe.
And Marc, who is the oldest of the group and fancied himself a formative influence on Serge, is aghast because he believes
his best friend has betrayed him by becoming an affected art snob who doesn't have the taste or the intelligence to differentiate
between a masterpiece and a pretentious fraud.
As the artistic director and founder of TinFish, Avramovich has
spent the past 17 years staging European literature and he knows the audience for pieces like "Art" are select but
enthusiastic.
"We do tend to draw smaller but devoted audiences," he said. "And it's true that 'Art'
has a lot of dialogue, but it's very smart, and there's absolutely nothing extraneous to it," said Avramovich.
"I see it as an alternative for people who don't want to see another Christmas show."
'ART'
Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. 8:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 3:30 p.m. Sundays through
Dec. 30, no show Thanksgiving, Thursday, Nov. 22. $20, $15 students and seniors. (773) 871-3000.
