New Repertory Theatre’s ‘Art’ is a portrait of friendship fraying

STAGE REVIEW

January 19, 2012|By Don Aucoin

Robert Walsh (left) is Serge and Robert Pemberton is Marc in Art at the New… (ANDREW BRILLIANT/BRILLIANT PICTURES)

WATERTOWN - French playwright Yasmina Reza has an undeniable gift for shrewd social observation. Would that she possessed a matching gift for dialogue.

As an admirable cast bickers its way through Reza’s “Art’’ at the New Repertory Theatre under the direction of Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, an unwelcome thought keeps crowding into the mind: This is not how real people talk.

Not even the kind of over-educated, over-analytical, overwrought men who natter on like Frasier and Niles Crane after one too many cappuccinos, arguing about the merits of a painting that is extremely costly and entirely white.

Yet somehow, despite the arch, mannered, stilted exchanges that often fall gratingly on the ear (and it’s possible something has been lost in Christopher Hampton’s translation), the play of ideas in “Art’’ adds up to an absorbing evening and, I think, fundamentally a better play than Reza’s “God of Carnage,’’ currently at the Huntington Theatre Company.

“Art’’ is framed by a large and important question, one that most of us have grappled with: What’s the right course of action if a longtime friend is suddenly revealed as someone you didn’t know as well as you thought, and may never really have known at all?

On the way to that weighty what-if, “Art’’ explores a couple of related issues: Does a difference in cultural taste among friends matter, and if so, how much? Can it rise to the level of a deal-breaker?

The opening scene of the New Rep’s “Art’’ pushes such topics to the forefront without a single word being spoken.

Two men are in a tastefully appointed apartment (by set designer Justin Townsend), gazing at an artwork with very different expressions on their faces. Serge (Robert Walsh) is positively palpitating with aesthetic pleasure, but Marc (a goateed Robert Pemberton), wears a look that slides from perplexity to dismay and back again.

The object of their attention is an all-white painting, by a fashionable artist named Antrios, that Serge has just purchased for 200,000 francs. (One is reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s line that “Art is anything you can get away with.’’)

When Marc voices his witheringly low opinion of the painting, Serge takes heated offense. He sees the painter as a genius and the painting as a masterpiece, and he takes Marc’s caustic criticism as a personal attack. Soon their disagreements about form and color escalate into dissections of each other’s words, motives, and character, sometimes addressed to each other, sometimes in asides to the audience.