review of *Art* at Interplayers

through March 27

“Art” isn’t about art at all. It’s about friendship: How we try to domineer our friends and mold them according to our own values.
It’s a thoughtful play, but “Art” is also a comedy — because the relationship decisions that playwright Yasmina Reza’s three characters make are all so laughably bad.
Suppose, for example, that your best friend did something that you considered wrong-minded, wasteful, pretentious and embarrassing. Would you tell him?
Would you tell him kindly, and with an eye to preserving your friendship? Or would you tell him unkindly, getting all principled and cold with him?

In director Reed McColm’s production of Yasmina Reza’s play (through March 27), Interplayers has bounced back with one of the current season’s best productions.

As Marc — who scoffs at the purchase by his friend Serge (Roger Welch) of an all-white painting — Jack Bannon offers the evening’s most subtle performance. When mocking the idea that a non-painting can have emotional “resonance,” Bannon clutches two hands to his chest and looks skyward, ever the martyr. When Serge praises an ancient writer for being “incredibly modern,” Bannon repeats the phrase with withering sarcasm. When Serge rebels against Marc’s disdain, Bannon responds with a resigned look, his hands folded, condescendingly calm.

Bannon's Marc seems to assume that his friends will share his taste in art — if they’re his friends, and if it’s really art.

Unfortunately, Bannon’s energy level seemed low at a preview-night performance; his voice, occasionally feeble. All three cast members were guilty of line-wobbles, noticeable lapses, places where the 90-minute, intermissionless pace needed to quicken. Over the course of the run, however, they’ll probably resolve such problems.

As Serge — purchaser of the all-white canvas — Roger Welch sweeps his arm across his prized possession. “It’s plain,” he says, investing the painting with more dignity than it deserves. It has only a few swipes of indiscernible color — enough to test whether we’ll restrain our ego (that’s a nice painting, Serge) or exert it (you’re an idiot, Serge).
Welch is perhaps at his best during the sequences when Serge and Marc gang up on their mutual friend Yvan (Patrick Treadway), who’s caught in the middle. Lounging on a sofa, with drink in hand, Welch tosses off insults with a sour expression, walking the fine line between blunt honesty and supercilious disdain.

Treadway’s finest moment comes in a mid-play rant, a miniature soap opera of a monologue in which Yvan whines about preparations for his upcoming wedding. Watch how Treadway avoids most look-how-frantic-I-am choices, instead choosing to stay seated on the couch, bouncing up only on occasion.

Poor spineless Yvan: caught between two massive egos, his pleas for the civility and consideration of genuine friendship go unheard. McColm emphasizes the dissolving friendships by disengaging his three actors in separate pools of light; for the various two-on-one face-offs, he aligns twosomes shoulder to shoulder while isolating the third actor.

Damon Abdallah's set successfully creates elegant ambience in the Upscale Spartan style.

Bannon invests the play’s final speech with a sobering reflection: We fill our lives with egotism. And then our lives disappear.
Will our legacies involve how many people loved us, or how well we upheld our principles? “Art” is the kind of play that inspires post-performance discussion — because you and your companions might have differing views about it.
At which point you may be compelled to choose: my friendships or my opinions?

“Art” sticks an all-white painting in our faces through March 27 on Wednesdays-Thursdays at 7:30 pm, Fridays at 8 pm, and Saturdays at 2 pm and 8 pm at Interplayers, 174 S. Howard St. Tickets: $15-$21; $12-$19, seniors; $10, student rush. Visit interplayers.com or call 455-PLAY.

photos: *Art* at Interplayers

March 11-27 at Interplayers
by Yasmina Reza
directed by Reed McColm
starring Jack Bannon as Marc, Patrick Treadway as Yvan and Roger Welch as Serge

premiered in Paris in 1994, in London in 1996, and in New York in 1998
Won the Tony for Best Play in '98
has been translated into 30 languages
last produced at Interplayers nine years ago this month, in March 2001 -- directed by Joan Welch and with a set by Jason Laws; starring Michael Weaver as Serge, Peter Murray as Marc, and Steven L. Barron as Yvan

Serge buys a white painting (with a few white lines on it) for 200,000 francs. He's quite proud of it.
His best friend Marc, nonplussed, can't quite believe that his friend has done such a stupid thing.
Their insecure friend Yvan, who has family and upcoming-wedding problems of his own, gets caught in the crossfire.
What's more important — friendship, or principles of aesthetics?
Would a real friend insist that you should like (and dislike) everything he likes (and dislikes)?

from a 3/8/01 review of the Interplayers production by some guy named Bowen:
Playwright Yasmina Reza welcomes you to a dramatic world where men spout beliefs they don't really feel in order to achieve a supremacy they don't really want.
After all, when a man loathes what his friend loves -- that all-white painting again -- what is he to do? Ultimately, "Art" suggests that sometimes we should just accept our friends' opinions, even if -- especially if -- those beliefs violate our own private criteria for good taste.
.... Like Serge and Marc in the play, we project onto our friends the traits we insist they should have. These are the traits, we like to think, that we ourselves have placed there.
[ a mostly positive review, with some criticisms of each of the actors and of the directing ]

Support shown

Sold out, three-quarters-full, nearly sold out — that's the report from Interplayers' three fund-raising performances of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters. Ellen Travolta and Jack Bannon donated their skills so that all receipts went toward keeping the theater's doors open. Best of all, playgoers opened their checkbooks and made additional donations.

Recession, gloom, nobody cares, blah blah — and yet there's a cohort of folks around here who want local theater to flourish. Travolta reports that after a similar, previous fund-raising performance, Bannon wrote Gurney to express how much that script moves listeners — and that Gurney wrote back in thanks.

We struggle. But the struggle's worth it.

[ photo: Gurney, from broadwayworld.com ]

Love Letters, Angels and Art

Ellen Travolta and Jack Bannon will appear in an Interplayers fundraiser, in three performances of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters, on Friday-Saturday, Jan. 29-30. Tickets: $25.

Honky Tonk Highway has been replaced by Honky Tonk Angels, with revised performance dates of Feb. 4-20.

Casting for the March 10-27 production of Yasmina Reza's Art has been announced: Jack Bannon, Patrick Treadway and Roger Welch.

Interplayers has got it *Together Again*

Interplayers is alive again -- the nearly full house, Joan Welch herself up there in the top row, the lively opening scene of Reed McColm's old/new Christmas play, the Spokane-obligatory but still nice-to-see standing ovation ... it felt like the turning of a corner, a rejuvenation.
It remains to be seen if playgoers will similarly turn out in droves for, say, the bleakness of Beckett when it's still gray and slushy (*Godot* in March at this same theater), but for one night at least, it felt like the Interplayers of old: a solid comedy, buzz in the lobby, people enjoying themselves.
Casual playgoers like their festive comedies for the holidays, and McColm delivers with *Together Again for the First Time*: a blended family that doesn't really get along, a bunch of wise-crackers who are hiding problems like bossiness and disappointment in love, being controlling and being in denial.
Two actors middle-aged, seven in their late teens or 20s: This show has done well in schools, as McColm acknowledges, because it has lots of age-appropriate roles for the college crowd. Better yet, it should appeal to twenty-something playgoers, because this isn't syrupy-sweet Christmas fare mired in long-ago nostalgic cultural assumptions of their grandparents. (*Star Wars* had only been out for nine years when McColm wrote this play, and it's used as Meaningful Analogy by the outsider-psychologist character [Damon Abdallah, likable and self-assertive]. The two brothers in the play treat *Star Trek* as almost current, but the mind-meld wrestling was amusing and not too dated.)
McColm knows his tricks: referring to outside events and characters in order to make a unit-set show feel as if it's part of a larger world; characters ignored by a swirl of characters, acting out their own little dramas and crying out for attention; episodes punctuated by out-of-left-field stingers from over there by the Christmas tree; throwaway jokes and gestures that round out characterizations without being underscored heavily (look at this! significant action over here!).
Bobo's away from his copy of the script just now, but despite having read and reread it and seen the movie (and now this first-ever professional production), he wants to go back over it, pore over the lines, recapture the zingers that brought delighted chuckles.
It was inevitable that, for a cast of nine that's heavy on the young'uns, a few would be making their professional stage debuts. But despite some missteps and mis-timings (oddly under-emphasized lines, slight bobbles with delivery or the logistics of props), this is a strong ensemble.

Karen Kalensky, fine as the Martha Stewart wanna-be, was convincing in all her domestic fussiness. But where she really shone was in confrontations with her sons: hitting them on the shoulder and calling them "lumps," blaming them for their flaws in ways that made it plain for all to see that actually, she was still venting her anger at the man she'd divorced eight (or more) years ago.
McColm himself, as the addled patriarch, nicely blends an Archie Bunker mentality with an ability to forbid further conversation when feelings are getting hurt too much: He's both obtuse and kindly, and it's an interesting combination to watch.
But the play, more than the movie, focuses on Roger -- the older of the matriarch's two sons, too much like his irresponsible father -- and Thomas Stewart pulls off the resentment and the compassion, the wise-ass self-loathing. Stewart took command of the stage as the architect (and other roles) in the season-opening *Dining Room." Stewart bites off hurtful one-liners, joshes around like a little boy, vents his anger, opens up his own wounds, and somehow also ends up making the play's most compassionate gesture. With humor and pain, he hits all the notes of a complex role.

All the other "kids" have their moments, and one virtue of McColm's script is that it achieves character revelation without resorting often to the predictable technique of the isolated, self-revealing monologue.

The movie has different scenes (bickering at Christmas dinner, the taping of a TV special that disintegrates because of smoldering family tensions) and less chaos (there are more two-shots and three-shots in the DVD, more F2F confrontations). McColm says that he deliberately upended his college professor's advice to write a comedy that starts slowly and has a chaotic final scene -- he and director Jack Bannon deserve much credit for an opening 20 minutes that builds and cross-cuts in dizzying ways, so well that it'd be well worth a second visit just to catch all the nuances.

At intermission, Dannie, Wife of Bobo (woman of long-suffering), made the often-heard comment that McColm's characters "act just like my family."
Bobo muttered something about how the play's universal like that -- a lot of people see their own family in this show.
To which, Kylie, Daughter of Bobo (wise at age 12), rejoined:
"I didn't think that many people knew our family."

Which is a nice compliment for McColm and the Interplayers cast to receive. *Together Again* shows us facets of ourselves - the pettiness and gratutious vengefulness, but also the cleverness and capacity to forgive and regenerate. It's a pleasant, fun, well-acted, sobering, crack-you-up kind of Christmas comedy. And it doesn't hurt that one of our own wrote it and tussled with it for about as long as many of the cast members have been alive, and that it has graduated to Lifetime and is serving in the meantime as a nice diversion in Spokane's downtown living room.
You have until Dec. 6 to see it. Afterwards, you'll be surprised at how well Reed McColm knows your family.

[photo: Reed McColm, at BooksInMotion.com]

*Together Again for the First Time*

at Spokane Interplayers Ensemble, Nov. 20-Dec. 6
Tickets: $10-$21
by Reed McColm

Set in Spokane at Christmas; first written in 1985. Comic in-fighting ensues when two middle-aged newlyweds (McColm himself and Karen Kalensky), who have already been married for seven years, bring their young-adult children together (again, for the first time) for the holidays. "Matters only get worse with the unexpected arrival of an ex-boyfriend, an unannounced television broadcast, and the revelation of a dark family secret." The 85-minute straight-to-DVD movie version, filmed last year in Provo, Utah, was released on Oct. 28. McColm's 23-year-old play is receiving its first professional stage production here, at just about the same time as the movie's premiere -- which may be some kind of world record. Buy the DVD here. More info here. A review is here.

directed by Jack Bannon
The Interplayers cast includes:
Reed McColm, Karen Kalensky, Damon Abdallah, Thomas Stewart, Jimmy Pendleton, Christine Cresswell, Bethany Hart, Maggie Wicken, Micah Hanson