Art

For a substantial sum, Serge buys a white-on-white painting; his two best friends' reactions and assessments nearly blow them apart. On the surface that's what Art is about. What it is, however, is itself art.

The play has, as Asolo's Associate Director Bruce Rodgers writes in his astute program notes, "multiple layers" of meanings and reasons to search for them. The seemingly simple play, minimally rendered, can evoke great humor, deep feeling and stunning drama." Dealing with ideas and the values of art, connecting them with life and the three men's lives, Art also explores their personalities and perspectives. His Modernist "investment" makes Serge feel chic, knowledgeable.  To literalist engineer Marc, anything abstract as well as investment in it, is merde-rous enough to kill his friendships with Serge and their mutual pal, Yvan. All Yvan wants is for everyone to be nice and happy, especially as he's even more harried than usual with wedding plans going awry. In their chain of conversations, one-on-one and all together, none speaks the same terms.

But all raise questions: What is art? How are values formed? What is the relation between cost and value? What are the definers and obligations of friendship? Is honesty the best policy? What can familiarity -- between people or with objects -- breed? Further, Art is loaded with subtext that reveals not only the characters' essence but also how they relate to work, women, families, food. (How brilliantly an olive-eating scene builds a bridge between war and peace!)

In one of those roles of-a-lifetime Reza has supplied for actors, Bradford Wallace brings a lifetime of surety to Marc. He remarkably gradates his composure according to whether Marc is confident, infuriated or pompous. Yvan's frustrations with family, now heightened by those from his friends, seem no less than David Breitbarth's own. He aces the lonely "joker." As Serge,  at first gloriously gleeful about his purchase, Douglas Jones gets heavy at times. He's the least successful transitioning between dialogue with the actors and direct address to the audience, which could be timed better. It doesn't help to have a distance to carry the painting in and out. Musical bridges (all modern, pulsating) between scenes and russet-colored backlighting of the otherwise neutral room also wear with repetition. Differentiating each man's apartment by a dominant painting on the back wall remains effective, as is basically black clothing for the men. (Yvan's has, of course, the most grey.) While not entirely artless, Asolo's Art is beaucoup artful.