‘Art,’ a look at friendship, might just leave you cold
In Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” onstage at Orlando’s Mad Cow Theatre, three men find their friendship on the ropes after one of them buys an unusual artwork.
Serge (Thom Mesrobian) has purchased a decidedly modern painting — a white background adorned with some faint white lines if you scrunch up your eyes. He is infatuated with his new piece; his friend Marc (Jay T. Becker) can’t see the attraction.
When “Art,” originally written in French, hit the English-speaking world in the late 1990s, prize-givers were as adoring of the work as the fictional Serge was besotted with his painting. Among the accolades: the Tony award for best new play and an Olivier Award — Britain’s Tony equivalent — for best new comedy.
Yet I find myself slinking toward Marc’s skeptical corner. Despite Reza’s concept, as shiny as an all-white painting, I kept seeing flaws in her canvas.
At Mad Cow, William Elliott has created a sleekly neutral set to host the controversial painting, all the better to let Aubrey Hess’s colorful costumes pop. Serge dresses in blues, while Marc goes for red. Yvan (Tommy Keesling), their stuck-in-the-middle chum, is attired in mustard. (One puzzlement — although Marc is repeatedly described as having classical taste, he sports the most flamboyant outfit.)
Director Mark Edward Smith has assembled a top-notch trio of actors, and he makes their funny bits work — a scene where the three peevishly share a bowl of olives is a delight. But even the formidable charms of Mad Cow vets Becker, Keesling and Mesrobian don’t make these men likable. Keesling’s hapless Yvan is at least pitiable, but that’s as good as it gets.
And therein lies a fundamental flaw in Reza’s play, which is really about the dynamics of friendship — the struggles to maintain a relationship, the shifting currents of power and the roles friends need to play with one another. There’s a hole at the heart of this play where the men’s friendship should be.
The audience isn’t told how or why the men became friends; there’s no evidence onstage as to why they should remain friends. They don’t talk or act like any friends I’ve ever observed. All this means there’s little reason to care how it turns out.
That being said, there are some highly entertaining moments. The highlight comes when soon-to-be-married Yvan launches into a tirade over a family dispute about wedding invitations. It succeeds not only because of Keesling’s red-faced, increasingly frantic, mile-a-minute delivery but because it feels genuine, like something that could happen to us or people we know.
That’s a feeling mostly absent from the remainder of this well-staged but cold-hearted enterprise.