Comedic Art holds mirror up to friendship
 Reviewed by Jo Ledingham
 
The question is: Can Marc, Serge and Yvan really be friends? After all, Marc chooses an idyllic landscape to grace his apartment walls; Yvan hands an amateurish abstract on his; and Serge goes out and spends 200,000 francs on a white painting - white background, white foreground with the possibility (if you squint) of some diagonal white lines slicing across the canvas. And anyway, should it matter to Serge if Marc refers to his new painting as "this shit" or that Yvan waffles but eventually concurs? Apparently, yes.
 
What follows is 90 uninterrupted minutes of very funny male squabbling that ranges from rants against deconstructionism to trashing each other's wives - past, present and future. Yvan, a self-described buffoon, tries to pacify Marc and Serge only to find himself the whipping boy for both of them.
 
It might be difficult to imagine Serge (a high-strung dermatologist), Marc (an aeronautical engineer) and Yvan (a salesman for a wholesale stationer) spilling their guts the way these three do - but who cares? With only a few slow moments, Art flies by with the power shifting back and forth like a high stakes ping pong match. This is top-of-the-line, literate slagging. And, of course, it goes far beyond a discussion of art into the realm of friendship: why do we choose the friends we do, what do we expect from them and they from us, and are white lies the price of friendship?
 
Ken MacDonald's steeply-raked, hardwood-faux set is clean, ultra-contemporary and serves as the apartment for each of the three guys: black leather and stainless steel furniture, an off-white area rug, small coffee table. Upstage, lighting designer Alan Brodie floods a narrow, floor-to-ceiling space with light. Marc and Yvan's paintings drop down, indicating the scene location. Serge, who hasn't decided which wall best suits his new purchase, carries his luminously white four-by-five canvas on and off stage, propping it first here, then there. (While handsome, the set works less well for casual, even sloppy Yvan than it does for impeccably suited Marc or trendy-in-black Serge. But it's clever, convenient and allows for the rapid switching from one apartment to another that Parisian playwright Yasmina Reza's script requires.)
 
Director David Storch brings Morris Panych back on stage after at 10-year hiatus and I realized in a flash how much I have missed seeing him perform. As Serge, Panych pulls off a difficult piece of work early in Art when he awaits Marc's response to the new acquisition. He sits, watching Marc, while everything from excitement to agony, uncertainty to smugness crosses his face and animates his posture. He's a kid with a shiny new bike waiting to see he envy on his best friend's face. He's a cat with a mouse. He's a guy applying for a job. He's a lover holding out a diamond ring to the girl of his dreams. It's all there, it's good and it's a great piece of casting. Panych fuses nervousness with bull-headedness the way few performers can.
 
Tom McBeath also gets a meaty role as Marc who, despite his superiority and condescension to both Serge and Yvan, is emotionally fragile. Hard to imagine a guy calling his best friend's purchase of a painting "a betrayal," but McBeath makes it feel possible. Hands nervously jingling in his trouser pockets and his harsh laugh barking out, McBeath fleshes out a complex character for whom friendship is a fixed stage with, he believes, well-defined rules.
 
Yvan's inclusion in the trio appears more a convenience to the playwright and to the structure of the play than it is likely, but Daryl Shuttleworth throws himself into the action with goofy abandon. A lengthy, almost breathless rant against the various mothers and stepmothers involved in his character's forthcoming marriage elicits a huge, well-deserved laugh. And anyway, Marc and Serge needed an intermediary to dump all over.
 
The conclusion (and there are at least two of them, perhaps three) is ambiguous and a little unsatisfying. It's difficult to tell whether Marc's poem-like summing up is intended to be fully ironic or whether he has turned a corner for the sake of friendship. And its' unsettling to discover that the next phase of the friendship between Marc and Serge will be based on a fib. But like art itself, Art is an open window through which you can examine your own relationships. Chances are they're less than picture-perfect, too.
 
Westender - March 22-28, 2001

 The Value of Art keeps rising
By Tom Zillich
 
Right now one of the hottest properties in the theatre world is Art, a play about three male friends who can't seem to agree on the value of a plain-white painting.
 
The Yasmina Reza script has been an award-winning hit in  London, New York and Paris, where it opened in 1994. In London's West End, the Best Comedy of the Year-acclaimed production is reportedly now into its 17th cast.
 
Here, Arts Club Theatre Company has secured the rights to stage the play at its Stanley Theatre, where Art opened Wednesday (March 21) for an extended run. The competing Vancouver Playhouse company had also expressed interest in staging Art here, but apparently lost out to the Arts Club.
 
"I think everyone in the country wanted to do it," say Playhouse artistic director Glynis Leyshon. " As much as I liked Art, we weren't prepared to get into that kind of a bidding war."
 
Instead, the Playhouse turned elsewhere and "was certainly happy with the notion" of ending its 2000-2001 season with the acclaimed Martin McDonagh play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which opens late-April. Another of McDonagh's scripts, The Cripple of Inishmaan, was produced by Arts Club for its Granville Island stage last month.
 
In order to produce a version of Art in Vancouver, Arts Club was given permission by the Toronto-based Mirvish family, which held the Canadian rights to the play. When a Mirvish plan for a North American Art tour fell through, Arts Club artistic director Bill Millerd snapped it up for Vancouver.
 
Theatre companies everywhere are experiencing difficulty locating and staging top-flight contemporary plays due to an increasing number of playwrights being lured to the film industry, says Millerd. Heightened interest among companies to stage a proven crowd-pleaser such as Art  is inevitable, he says.
 
"It's one of the anchors of our season. We were able to add an extra three weeks to the run (which ends May 6), which might have helped us get it. When I saw it in London, I knew it is something that Vancouver will understand, because we have a lot of artists in the community. It has something to say and says it in an interesting way."
 
Playwright Reza, an Iranian-born Parisian, wrote Art in French. The script has been translated for English audiences by Christopher Hampton, the 1988 Oscar winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
 
The version of Art  on stage at The Stanley stars three seasoned West Coast actors - Tom McBeath, Morris Panych and Daryl Shuttleworth - as the trio of friends. Panych plays Serge, the proud new owner of the controversial white canvas. His big-bucks purchase tests his age-old friendship with the horrified Marc (Tom McBeath). Their diplomatic, eager-to-please pal, Yvan, is played by Shuttleworth.
 
Ken MacDonald has designed a simple, spare set for The Stanley stage. Roughly 90 per cent of the 90-minute play's action takes place in Serge's apartment, without intermission.
 
A challenge for director David Storch is to measure up to previous productions of Art, none of which he's seen. "You can fuck up anything, but I think this will work," says the Montreal-born director and actor.
 
"The comedy comes from a very subtle place, so finding the perfect balance is the biggest challenge. It's a fine piece of writing-smart and clever, wisely put together." Storch says one of the biggest misconceptions about Art is that it's actually about art. "The central focus is this white square, but the play is actually about friendship. That's one of the reasons it's been popular. There's lots of stuff out there about love, death and money."
 
Millerd liked what he heard following the first preview show of Art late last week. "It was full in there, and afterward people were discussing it, which is great. Usually, people just get up and leave, but this one almost forces people to talk about it."
 
 
 

The Province - Thursday, March 22, 2001

 
Fine Art deserves appreciation
By Jonathan McDonald - Entertainment Today! Editor
 
Serge is living the good life in Paris. He must be, since he just shelled out 200,000 francs for a painting. An all-white painting. He friends thing he's - how shall we put this - crazy. Investing in art is one thing. But an all-white painting?
 
Such is the premise of Art, Yasmina Reza's comedy about the longtime friendship of three men. A smash success on Broadway and in London, the Tony Award winner has attracted some of the theatre's biggest names, as well as a wide selection of Hollywood men - such as Albert Finney (Erin Brockovich), George Wendt (Cheers), George Segal (Just Shoot Me), and Buck Henry (The Graduate, Heaven Can Wait).
 
Add one more big name to the list. The Vancouver production brings Governor General's Award-winning playwright Morris Panych (The Overcoat) back to the stage. His latest, Earshot, has been packing them in at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre.
 
Q: Two hundred thousand francs for an all-white painting. Hmmm. That's a lot of money for an all-white painting, isn't it?
 
Panych: Get serious. You can't buy a pair of Prada shoes for that. Have you been to Holt Renfrew lately? Two Hundred thousand francs - check your currency converter - is only $45,000. When was the last time you had dinner at C?
 
Q: How would your character answer that question?
A: He says, "That's what it costs, it's an Antrios." (The fictional painter of the fictional white painting.) It's not about real value anyway. Nothing is worth $45,000, except a fast ferry. It's about relative value. Forty-five thousand, at the movies, will get you a bag of popcorn and a small Coke.
 
Q: Let's stick with this all-white painting for a second. And now that you've gotten into Serge's head, what to you see?
A: It's brilliant. Audacious. It's a statement (a very subtle one) about what matters and what doesn't matter. It's about the absence of art; the fluidity and relativity of art. Most importantly - it's an Antrios. People in the audience laugh when I first say how much the painting costs but if I said it was a Picasso, if I said it was a Rembrandt, people wouldn't laugh. People laugh because they think they know what they're looking at. People are fickle. A hundred years ago, Van Gogh was just another insane Dutchman withough an ear living in Arles.
 
Q: There's no doubt that Art is about life. A seemingly innocuous chat about painting turns into the disintegration of friendships. A piece of art, a car, a house, a pair of pants someone has issues with. Happens all the time, doesn't it?
A: If I had a tiff with my friends every time I put on a different pair of pants, I wouldn't have any friends. Wait a minute - I don't have any friends, man, I've got a lot of pants.
 
Q: Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire, an orange stripe between two blue stripes, was bought by the National Gallery for $2 million. Sensible purchase?
A: The point isn't to make sensible purchases. If the point was to make sensible purchases, there would be not art in the National Gallery; there'd be lots and lots of flat-soled shoes and a whole pile of oatmeal. It's not sensible to purchase art. The beauty of art is its insensibility. If the world was only sensible, it would be like living at your aunt's house. Worse, it's be like living at Paul Martin's aunt's house. Mutual funds are sensible. Art is art.
 
Q: You haven't acted in a long time. Why not? Why now?
A: I haven't been on stage in seven years - I started to seel it was now or never. I wanted to feel the feeling of being completely vulnerable and "out there" again. I wanted to get scared. It's easy directing people to do things. It's a lot harder actually doing those things. And I missed the audience, mostly. When you're a writer, a director, you stand behind them and watch them; it's lonely.
 
Q: Ken MacDonald, your longtime set designer collaborator, is responsible for Art's look. He painted the all-white painting. Is it a reasonable facsimile of all of the other all-white paintings? Don't hold back!
A: His is the best. Ken has a fundamental understanding of this art and this period. Ken is a genius. But only at this. He's what you can an idiot savant. He can design the most beautiful sets in the world but, for example, he doesn't know how to load a dishwasher.
 
The Vancouver Courier - Wednesday, March 21, 2001

 
Art dissects loyalty, taste
Fiona Hughes
 
It's hard to get away from the subject of male bonding in movies, plays or sitcoms. Stories about friendships among males seems to be a perennially favourite topic - although the majority are often poorly done because the topic is treated superficially. In Art, opening tonight at The Stanley Theatre and running until May 6, playwright Yasmina Reza takes the notion of truth and friendship to artful heights. Her award-winning comedy, which opened in Paris in 1994, hits so many nerves, audience members have been know to walk out arguing with each other.
 
The story of Art is simple, with the underlying themes fodder for Reza's prickly wit, for which she won London's Evening Standards Award for best comedy of the year and a Tony Award. It revolves around three men - Serge, Marc and Yvan - who've been friends for 15 years. The deterioration begins when physician Serge (Morris Panych) purchases and expensive modern painting that his friend Marc, and engineer (Tom McBeath), deems a waste of money and an affront to their friendship (only in France could such a play be written). Marc enlists the support of their easygoing friend and slightly younger Yvan (Daryl Shuttleworth) to reinforce his case. Yvan, however, is preoccupied with other things, such as preparing for his wedding and tries to smooth things over between the two. Serge meanwhile, upset by Marc's reaction, decides to vent a few long-repressed opinions of his own. What follows is an opinion. "Art is the catalyst that brings about a sea change in their friendship," says Shuttleworth. "The play is about truth and whether friends really tell each other the truth or are friendships just a convenience. It's about respecting another person's opinion."
 
Since signing on to the play, Shuttleworth has had time to reflect on his own male friendships and compare them to the ones in Art. Dressed head to toe in black, Shuttleworth says he's not like his character Yvan, who plays the peace-maker role between the warring friends.
 
"I'm a people pleaser but not a peace maker," says the 40-year-old father of two. "It's not surprising that Yvan is actually friends with these two other men. He's a guy who hasn't really done anything in his 40 years. He's not all driven like the other two and just waits for life to happen to him."
 
As in the play, Shuttleworth has two good male friends (one in Toronto, the other in L.A.) but doesn't believe they'd ever argue over a piece of art the way Serge and Marc do.
 
"Marc is cruel and Serge is an idiot for buying the painting," he says. "These characters are all a bit sad, really. They are all trying to do the right thing but they get caught up on the status aspect. For example, Serge buys the painting thinking it will elevate him and make him feel better. If one of my friends bought a painting I didn't like, I probably wouldn't say anything. Sometimes it's not worth it. But if they asked, I just might say it's not my taste. Innocent things get said - we all do it. Usually, I choose not to say things because it's just easier."
 
What intrigues Shuttleworth about Art is that playwright Reza, a woman, decided to write the play featuring male characters. The play is allegedly based on an event in Reza's like. "During rehearsals, we have said, 'Hmmm...as men, I don't think this is necessarily accurate,' but it's fun and playful. The way the play ends is what's sweet about it. It leaves a great sense of: 'OK, what's next?' which is what theatre is supposed to do."
 
 
Vancouver Sun - Tuesday, March 20, 2001
 
Panych attack
 By Peter Birnie
 
Veteran Vancouver playwright Morris Panych hits the stage for the first time in seven years in comedy about modern painting.
 
If you're going to sing Morris Panych's praises, try to do it quietly. For someone whose reputation has never suffered from accusations of timidity, Panych actually has a strong aversion to loud noises and the people who make them.
 
He's a director whose collaborations with partner and set designer Ken MacDonald led most recently to a triple play of powerful and popular pieces at the Arts Club's Stanley Theatre: Hamlet, Sweeney Todd and She Loves Me. Panych is also an actor, although a return to the boards this week in Art marks his first stage appearance in seven years.
 
But it's the writer's side of this triple threat that has Panych feeling so sensitive. He was busy with The Dishwashers, which he describes as a slightly surreal absurd comedy about the interminability of working in the dungeon of a restaurant. "I love the image because dishes never end," Panuch says. "It seems fantastically Sisyphean to me."
 
Then a door slammed or a phone rang or a truck backfired, "and I realized how obsessed and fascinated I was with extraneous noise." The result was Earshot, a one-act play about a man whose extrasensory hearing allows him to listen in on every tiny detail of the lives being led all around his lonely existence.
 
"He creases whole scenarios, partly true, partly made-up, creating relationships with people who don't exist," says Panych. "I tried to create some sense of the true meaning of loneliness."
 
Earshot closes this weekend in Toronto after a successful fun at Tarragon Theatre's Extra Space. Panych has enjoyed a long working relationship with Tarragon artistic director Urjo Kareda, but this is only the second time the playwright's work has had its debut in the eat. The first was with Lawrence & Holloman in 1998, but usually it's the other way 'round - such works as 7 Stories (1991), The Ennds of the Earth (1992) and Vigil (1995) opened here at the Arts Club or Victoria's Belfry Theatre before heading to the Tarragon.
 
Panych is the first to admit his plays are not plot-driven, relying instead on the rich words of strange characters caught in dark and absurd situations as they contemplate the great questions of like, death, love angst. He enjoyed one of his greatest successes with 7 Stories, which packed houses a decade ago at the Arts Club's  much missed Seymour Street stage by offering both laughs and insight in the story of a man standing on a ledge, ready to commit suicide but for all the people who keep interrupting him.
 
Panych's acting career has been interrupted since 1994, when he starred in a Vancouver Playhouse production of Bernard-Marie Koltes' The Struggle of the Dogs and the Black.
 
"One of the reasons I stopped acting," he says, "is because I don't like being told what to do. It's unbearable being directed, especially after seven years of directing, and I'm sure there are lots of actors out there laughing at the thought."

Opening Wednesday at The Stanley, Art is playwright Yasmina Reza's sharp comedy about what happens when Panych's character pays 200,000 francs for a painting that appears, on the surface, to be nothing more than white-on-white. Like the firestorm of controversy generated by the price Canada paid for Barnett Newman's monochromatic Voice of Fire (let alone the stink that arose about Jana Sterbak's meat dress), the arguments in Art blast from both sides - Tom McBeath plays a friend who thinks the painting is a con job, while Daryl Shuttleworth is the friend who's caught in the middle of the battle about what constitutes art.
 
Panych has wanted to play Serve since seeing the play in London. " I can argue his points because I understand that kind of thinking," he says. "In order for art, for theatre, for dance, for anything to move forward it has to change, become more complex and interesting, and so it may leave you behind."
 
Nevertheless, and despite years of education in art history from MacDonald, Panych was still left gasping after a recent tour of the Tate Gallery's new branch-plant in London's old Bankside power station.
 
"I don't understand any of it," he says with a laugh. "I admire it and appreciate it and applaud it, but at the same time I reserve the right to loathe every single speck of it."
 
Whatever the arguments in Art, he notes, "Its' not really a play about three men who try to define the parameters of their relationship through this piece of art."
 
The day after it closes, he and MacDonald escape on their annual trip to Europe. Less of London's West End "because there's great theatre there but boy, there's some bad theatre," means more time to explore places they've never been, which this year might mean Rome or Sardinia. On his return, despite having to get The Dishwashers ready for a production next year and somehow transform The Overcoat, his marvellous collaboration with Wendy Gorling, into a CBC TV special, Panych hopes to devote more time to fewer projects.
 
"I tend to panic," he says, "and fill up my life with work and things in case I don't have anything to do. I promised myself I would get serious in my 50s, so I still have a couple of years."
 
Georgia Straight - March 15 - 22, 2001

Art is not Just for Art's Sake
By Colin Thomas

 
Director David Storch is clear on what the play Art is and is not about: Art is not about art, he maintains. "It's about male friendship and the difficulty that men have - hetero men - in talking about their emotional lives."
 
Storch's take makes sense of the show's phenomenal success: Parisian playwright Yasmina Reza's script has won Tony, Oliver, and Moli?re awards; the London production is in its fifth year and 17th cast; the text has been translated into more than 30 languages; and this 90-minute work has established Reza as the most internationally renowned playwright of her generation. You don't win that kind of popular success with a discussion of the finder points of postmodernism; you can, however, win it from the best kind of comedy, comedy in which laughter springs from the recognition of human absurdity.
 
On the surface, Art does seem to be about painting. Serge spends 200,000 francs for a minimalist canvas. Serge's purchase infuriates his friend Marc, who sees the painting as flat white, the deal as a swindle, and, suddenly, his friend as an elitist. Their mutual pal Yvan, the conciliator, gets caught between Serge and Marc, who alternate between abusing him for his spinelessness and campaigning for his support.
 
The men at every point of this triangle have a torturous time addressing their emotions. "Poor fucking men," says Storch, laughing, as we sit in an office at the Arts Club's Granville Island facility, where Art will run from Wednesday (March 21) to May 6. "If they said what was in their hearts, Art would be a three-minute play. But instead they talk about art, and bring in the names of authors they admire. And, as men do, they get into these really bizarre, circular conversations in which they get closer and closer to speaking the truth, but when they get too close, they recoil because it gets too dangerous."
 
Storch defends his position that Art is specifically about male friendships by referring to an interview that he read with the playwright. "She was approached by a Broadway producer who wanted to do an all-female version of it, and she went, 'You're crazy. This could not happen among women. This is a play about men constructed with all male arguments.'" Apparently, Reza's inspiration for the piece came when a friend of hers spent a lot of money on a white painting. When Reza saw the work, she told her friend that she was insane, then - unlike for the men in Art - it was over for them. They laughed about it and went shopping.
 
Quoted in this month's issue of Vogue, the 41-year-old Reza maintains that she doesn't understand men, so she writes intuitively: "I was drawn to writing about men because the other sex is the perfect mask. If I create a female character, I'm quickly in her skin, exposing myself. The mask give me freedom. A man also enjoys freedom of language. He can say things that, if spoken by a woman, would make her sound like a slut."
 
Masculinity is a mask even for males, of course, and social relationships can lodge it so firmly in place that it becomes suffocating. "At the tail end of the play," Storch points out, "Yvan says that he can no longer bear the sound of rational argument: 'Nothing good, wonderful, or beautiful has ever come from rational argument. When I hear it, I start to cry.' Because the sound of men arguing can be so cold and clinical."
 
According to Storch, Reza reveals the heart of her play in a deliberately absurd quote from Yvan's therapist. "It goes: 'If I'm who I am because I'm who I am and you're who you are because you're who you are, then I'm who I am and you're who you are. If, on the other hand, I'm who I am because you're who you are and you're who you are because I'm who I I am, then I'm not who I am and you're not who you are.' To Marc and Serge, this sounds like idiotic psychobabble, but somebody has actually presented the golden key. It's simply saying that, if we allow other people to define us, then we're in a dangerous position."
 
Storch knows exactly what he wants from his mounting of Art. "The hallmark of a successful production is not when people leave the theatre saying, 'I loved the set. That was a funny line.' Instead, they leave talking about their lives. I think this show will make audiences laugh a lot the way that good comedies well done do: they'll laugh at things that they recognize to be true about themselves. And they'll think about how they treat their friends and those closest to them."