Critics have already identified the near-universal appeal of this show about the implosion of three longtime friendships over a piece of modern art as the very democratic lure of the tabula rasa, the canvas waiting to be filled with whatever you want to see. This is an understandable claim, as the painting at the center of the play's nasty squabbling is composed of white brush strokes on a white background, but I believe it's too reflexive and therefore misguided. Art draws you in not by letting you choose what you want to see, but by confronting you, irresistibly and methodically and with a curiously tender mercilessness, with what you'd rather ignore: how friendships are often built on self-deception and dependency.
The theater, movies, TV, and pop music batter us with reminders of the impermanence of romantic love. But the popular assumption is that if we choose lovers by need, we choose friends by want: True friendship is widely regarded as the last bastion of sanity in human connection. Playwright Reza and Christopher Hampton, who wrote the English-language adaptation of Art, dab at this belief with firm and gentle strokes until it disappears.
And Dallas Summer Musicals' Contemporary Broadway Series brought a nimble and vivid New York version of Art to our city for a mere six days (it closed last Sunday). As directed by Brit Matthew Warchus, who helmed the Broadway production, the touring play arrived with all its tap-dance banter perfectly synchronized. Big touring musicals often bring you faded stars recycled as musical troupers (Petula Clark in Sunset Boulevard), which gives the whole affair a certain sense of overexertion, but the Contemporary Broadway Series boasted a big touring dark comedy with a true stage veteran who'd been recycled as a TV star -- Taxi's Judd Hirsch.
Hirsch doesn't have marquee presence, but he has a theater professional's focus and brittle commitment to the role he's playing. He was marvelously dogged and unself-conscious as Marc, a tactless man with a bullshit detector that gets tripped rather too easily. In other words, while it's true that Marc doesn't suffer fools gladly, he spends altogether too much time interpreting the behavior of those around him as foolish. As the saying goes, the harder you smell, the more people stink. And Marc catches a whiff of credulity when longtime but younger buddy Serge (Cotter Smith) pays 200,000 francs for a 5-by-4-foot painting that's all white.
Serge insists, of course, that there are different shades of white, and that if you search the picture hard enough, you can see hints of red and yellow. But Marc can't look at the painting, because he can't stop staring at Serge in hostile disbelief. The older man condemns the younger one as a victim of the relentless scam that is modern art; the younger one shoots back that the older one is an arrogant neo-classicist with blind disdain for all innovation in his time. Things start to deteriorate rapidly from there.
But the real pivotal character in Art, the one who raises it above mere amusing aesthetic discourse to a truly haunting look at the inequality of adult friendships, is Yvan (Jack Willis), the third friend who gets caught between Marc and Serge's cannonball verbal exchanges and is eventually beaten down by them. Yvan is not as successful as the others (he's marrying a woman he probably doesn't love to get into the stationery business), perhaps not as smart, certainly not as self-aware in his cultivation of worldly tastes (Marc viciously dismisses a painting in Yvan's living room as motel art, even though it was painted by the owner's father). But he has created a niche in their lives by his sheer voracious need to please.
Marc and Serge attempt to use Yvan as a weapon against each other, trying to get him to defend and attack the all-white painting. But he can be stretched only so far until he snaps, and when he is no longer of use to the other two, they turn on him. The episode with the white painting, we are meant to see, has very little to do with disagreements over modern art and everything to do with reflecting the dynamic that has driven this trio for years. Marc and Serge have forged a friendship based on a mutual suspicion that each is superior in intellect and professional and romantic achievements to the other; this philosophical disagreement exposes that.
But they have acquired Yvan as a friend because both know they are superior, at least in their ability to make him feel inferior. I couldn't shake Willis' beautifully true performance as the pudgy, flustered, unhappy Yvan for hours afterward. Unable to compete with Marc and Serge, he desperately seeks a tranquility in friendship that they cannot abide. "Nothing beautiful was ever created through rational argument" is one of the eviscerated Yvan's final lines, and even if we understand that no creation is possible without conflict, part of us does long for the respite from tedious ego that Yvan would achieve...even though it means denying himself.
