‘YELLOW HOUSE’ IS A DARK STUDY OF VAN GOGH’S AWAKENING
When most people think of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, they remember only the richly colored and thickly textured landscapes and still lifes that he created during the two years before his death by suicide in southern France in 1890.
Kimber Lee’s play “to the yellow house,” which made its world premiere Sunday at La Jolla Playhouse, opens just weeks after the Dutch painter has arrived — haunted and destitute — in the southern town of Arles in 1888. But the play doesn’t linger there for long. Instead it travels back in time to Paris, where Van Gogh moved in 1886 with the hope of improving his painting skills and becoming a celebrated artist, at last.
Lee’s play isn’t about Van Gogh’s artistic awakening in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, but about those two troubled years in Paris, where he struggled to make a breakthrough, create a circle of like-minded painters, host his first show and have a successful romantic relationship.
If that sounds like a lot of story, it is. The two-hour, 45minute play directed by Neel Keller feels overstuffed with subplots, and its overall mood is gray and gloomy.
Where the play sparkles is the tender and symbiotic relationship that Lee builds between Vincent and his younger brother, Theo, a successful Paris art dealer who doubts his brother’s talent but has always supported him financially and emotionally.
Paco Tolson’s heartbreaking performance as Vincent honestly represents the artist’s famously combative personality and antisocial behavior, described in the play as that of a man who has just gotten out of prison after 10 years. As Theo, Frankie J. Alvarez is loving, sympathetic and warm but ready to cut the apron strings.
Deidrie Henry also shines as Agostino Segorati, the real-life proprietress of a Montmartre cafe where a love-struck Vincent had his first show. Also entertaining is Marco Barricelli, who plays a very different trio of real-life painters who Vincent met in Paris: Fernand Cormon, his disengaged and disapproving painting teacher; academist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who
distrusted the new schools of art; and Paul Gaugin, the post-impressionist who was Vincent’s last remaining friend. There are also appearances by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Alton Alburo) and Émile Bernard (DeLeon Dallas), who were fellow students in Cormon’s salon. Brooke Ishibashi energetically plays a pair of female characters in Paris and Arles whose characters add little to the play.
Takeshi Kata’s stunning scenic design is a two-story scaffolding-style frame overlaid with huge, heavily textured canvases on which projection designer Nicholas Hussong projects sketches and paintings of 1880s Paris in gray, black and muted colors. David Israel Reynoso’s richly detailed costumes look like they stepped right out of paintings, Masha Tsimring’s lighting is dark and moody, Justin Ellington’s original music is haunting, and Palmer Hefferan designed sound.
Lee infuses her play with humor and historical detail that made me want to learn more, which is always a good thing. Her goal with “to the yellow house” was to show how Van Gogh never gave up despite repeated setbacks and rejections. But it was disappointing to not get at least a taste of the glorious swirling blue cosmos, the bold and chunky yellow wheat fields and the sensual purple irises that Vincent discovered in the end.