‘Art’ provokes competition
Friendship tested over painting
Can a disagreement about a painting tank a friendship?
If Keats is right when suggesting that beauty is truth and that’s all we need to know, why the heck not?
Yasmina Reza is doing the asking in “Art,” her popular, Tony-winning play featuring three longtime friends who will eventually come to blows over a large, seemingly all-white painting. It’s now on stage courtesy of the Milwaukee Entertainment Group under Lindsey Erin’s direction.
Serge (Mark Neufang) has bought this artwork, insisting to friend Marc (Randall T. Anderson) that it’s a steal at $200,000. Marc thinks it’s junk, choosing a common, more vulgar word to say so when Serge invites him over for a look. Yvan (Chris Goode) is caught in the middle — partly because he tells both men what they want to hear rather than advancing an opinion of his own.
And so it goes for 90, intermission-free minutes of frequently funny dialogue, delivered by three men who tell us (in periodic audience asides) and each other that they have no sense of humor, while debating what constitutes taste with regard to art, books, women and food.
That’s part of the fun; Marc and Serge take themselves so seriously — and are so sure of themselves — that they often fail to see all they have in common. Each one is a haughty alpha male convinced he’s the smartest guy in the room and contemptuous of everyone else.
Whatever their artistic differences — Serge is a modernist, Marc a traditionalist — these two are obverse sides of the same coin. Part of why they get on each other’s nerves is because they’re so much alike.
But what’s made them this way? And what does their cultivated sense of superiority hide?
Anderson and Neufang make us laugh aplenty, in a script that often resembles a sitcom. But they do so by playing their characters as types, exaggerating their worst tendencies — and, in Neufang’s case, mugging for us — rather than plumbing the latent loneliness that characterizes and undermines so many male friendships.
That leaves Yvan, the punching bag in the middle who goes along to get along, playing the clown and eager to please. That’s what Goode gives us, smiling so hard it hurts as he tries to keep the peace — all because he’s terrified at the prospect of making a decision and choosing sides.
Yvan gets the play’s juiciest monologue — delivered by Goode with the right balance between farce and pathos — but that’s not why audiences always love him most. Yvan regularly gets our vote because he’s most like us, in a world where it’s ever harder to both think for oneself and muster the courage of one’s convictions, about art and so much else.
“Art” continues through May 20 at the Brumder Mansion, 3046 W. Wisconsin Ave. For tickets, visit brownpaper tickets.com/event/2940237. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.