“Art”

Written by:  Yasmina Reza
Directed by:  Matthew Warchus
Starring: Judd Hirsch, Cotter Smith, and Jack Willis
Performances at the Eisenhower Theatre at The Kennedy Center

Through May 7, 2000

“Art:” Everyone’s A Critic by Taru Helne

“Art,” the 1998 Tony winning play by Yasmina Reza, is billed by the Kennedy Center as a comedy, but the laughs it brings are rueful with self-recognition, shocked with hard truths, and then silenced by the sad realization of the motivations behind friendship.  

Set upon a stark white stage- the walls of a large apartment, a solid white block-style table, and three white chairs of differing styles- “Art” takes us from a simple artistic disagreement to an all-out verbal battle between three longtime friends.  By the end of the play, the white set swirls with the complex hues of emotion, and one recognizes the chairs as metaphors for the personalities of each of these very different men- one simple and comfortable, one straight-backed and classical in style, and one modern, sleek and no doubt expensive.  The air itself feels like an element of the design of this set- tension and questions hang suspended as we wait for them all to come crashing down.

Marc, played to irritated perfection by Judd Hirsch (Taxi), is an aeronautical engineer appalled by the 200,000 francs his old friend Serge (Cotter Smith) has just paid for a painting that is, to all outward appearances, just a blank white canvas “gussied up with a few white lines.” Fancying himself to be a classicist of sorts, Marc prefers artwork like the French landscape (which Serge haughtily deems “Flemish” in style) hanging in his living room, and is offended by what he perceives as some sort of fraud masquerading as a work of art. Serge is a doctor so impressed with the value of his new acquisition by a fashionable painter that one gets the feeling that when he looks at the canvas the color he is seeing is not white but green.  Professing brilliance in the spectrum of white used for the painting, Serge believes Marc to be old-fashioned and closed-minded.  Enter Jack Willis’s Yvan, a schlumpy everyman who has just started working as a stationary salesman for his future in-laws’ business.  Marc believes that the simple and accommodating Yvan will agree with him on the frivolousness of Serge’s investment, and sends him over to have a look.  Wanting to please everyone, move on, and forget about it, Yvan looks for something to like in the painting, and is able to get Serge to laugh about his enormous expenditure.  When Marc realizes that he’s not siding up in alliance, the relatively innocuous artistic squabble begins to evolve into a war of words, in which not one of the men is safe from the poison darts hurtfully flung from one to the other. 

As the men debate why Serge sees anything of value in his six-figure painting, they also begin to question the value and motivations behind their own friendships with one another.  Like an over-analyzed piece of art, their relationships, when broken down, seem to lose their meaning. 

As Marc and Serge grapple to see what they have gained or lost through their friendship, Yvan seeks just to restore normalcy.  Like a person who likes a painting without caring why (like the “hotel room art” bowl of pears adorning his own wall), Yvan doesn’t want to look any more deeply into his relationship with Marc and Serge than he feels he needs to.   At the end, no man is unchanged by what transpires during the “evening of the white painting,” and the audience can’t help but to question the nature of his or her own friendships.

While the lessons of the play may be bittersweet and just plain sad in some points, “Art” has moments, mostly provided by Willis’s Yvan, of  great hilarity.  The delightfully simple absurdity of everyday problems, best portrayed in Yvan’s rapid-fire, sputtering account of a wedding invitation debacle, provides a refreshing contrast to the unexpected complexity of the relationships between the three men.  These interludes are a welcome reprieve from the wince-inducing truths of the play, and are scattered like fresh air throughout. 

One alternates between sympathy and distaste for each of the characters in the play as we witness what is revealed about each in their emotional undressing.  The play culminates in a heartbreaking scene in which the cruelty of the debate takes its toll on the kindly buffoon Yvan, and the truth of “Art” comes to a startling head.  The actors are well suited to their roles, and each seems to be relishing the particular qualities the man whose shoes they are walking in.  Cotter Smith’s Serge is crisply pretentious, smug in his designer clothes and (offstage) circle of well-heeled acquaintances.  Hirsch’s Marc practically crackles with caustic disapproval, but every now and then we get a glimpse of self-pity through his indignant façade.  As Yvan, Jack Willis steals the stage more than once, and it’s not hard to see how his role as comic foil to their self-involved strivers endeared him to Marc and Serge to begin with.

Only 90 minutes in length, “Art” is remarkable for the virtuosity of its emotional manipulation.  The actual language of the script is a little awkward in some spots, most likely due to the translation from French to English.  Indeed, the characters don’t pretend to be anything other than French, and their Europeanness is what makes the naked dialogue about male friendship (the word “love” is uttered more than once) more credible.  Despite the very minor issues with some of the lines, especially initially, the universality of the meaning in this play is breathtaking.  “Art” poses an uncomfortable challenge to its audiences about every relationship- How do you know when to accept a friendship and all of its beauty and flaws at face value… and when to realize it isn’t worth the canvas it is painted on?