The Launch Prize

Play (2016)
by MJ Halberstadt

With Katharine Chen Lerner (Kim), Bari Robinson (Sebastian), Angela K. Thomas (Michelle), John Tracey (Austin)

The announcement of the award of the noted Launch Prize is hovering over the quartet of talented young artists, each of whom dreams of getting it. The award is meant to provide broad travel oppoortunities to the winner in the hopes of stimulating his/her artistic process.

These four fellow students at art school are all ethnically different and don’t hold back when speaking about their differences.

Michelle (Angela K. Thomas) is African-American, pledging to travel in Africa and work on arts education programs there, and subject to intense scrutiny by her fellows who regard her pitch as appealing blatantly to what they regard as a predisposition to favor and support candidates of color.

Kim (Katharine Chen Lerner) has submitted her work under a pseudonym in order to avoid what she feels will be negative stereotyping of her as an Asian-American.

Austin (John Tracey), a white Irish-American, feels very left out of the running because he feels being male and white is considered totally déclassé in such circles.

And Sebastian (Bari Robinson) has a kind of devil-may-care attitude and has, in recent months, become a kind of “ghost painter” for an artist named Antrios who, as a front, seems to be scoring big with Sebastian’s paintings.

Personal and interpersonal complications abound.

Kim is tightly wound and constrained emotionally, sadly aware that her apparently neglectful mother will not come to her graduation.

Kim and Sebastian seem to have something going, though Kim has not owned up to it and, in particular, has not mentioned it to Michelle, one of her closest friends.

The three non-white characters taunt Austin into making ethnic jokes, somehow to ease the tension of their differences, until he calls Kim by an ethnic slur, which, as he notes, identifies the boundary beyond which joking can’t take place. There’s the line – I found it, he says.

Horrified at Sebastian’s mercenary involvement with the Antrios caper, the others claim he’s not an artist but a businessman. Meanwhile, the others take Michelle to task for being engaged to a rich doctor.

The gimmick of the play – which enables interesting perspectival experimenation by each character – provides a cute method for surprising, revising and considering the various possibilities, while never actually declaring what takes place. It’s an effective technique for giving the upper hand to each character in a different way, while considering, in the accumulation of perspectives, the entire mission of art.

Indeed, this play resembles, as hearkens back to, Yasmina Reza’s great potently concise comedy Art which figures three middle-aged Parisian male companions arguing about the purchase of a nearly all-white painting at exorbitant cost by one of them. That play is a masterful interlacing of arguments about the intentions of art and the navigation of friendship.

Playwright MJ Halberstadt avows Art as one of his favorite plays and unabashedly pays homage to it here. As in Art, in which the unseen painter of the nearly all-white canvas is named Antrios, the unseen painter who here serves as the front for Sebastian is also called Antrios. Clearly, The Launch Prize is a kind of improvisation on somewhat related themes to those in Art, though, here, the issue is what goes on between a group of artists rather than among a group of friends who buy or view art.

There’s a lot under the hood here about what constitutes success in the profession, and how much it depends on a kind of trendy focus upon one ethnic modality or another. And, as well, it’s a reflection on the business of art and the possibility of developing contexts in which scarcity of opportunity is not so intense and in which collaboration and collective support abound. In hungering for the vaunted prize and in viciously attacking one another on ethnic grounds, the candidates here show a shocking combination of vulnerability and aggressiveness that all but prevents their mutual support from flourishing.

The capstone appears in a brief coda by Sebastian who, in reflecting on his own potential success, considers the possibility of providing havens for successes of others.

A step back to meta-land while watching this drama by MJ Halberstadt, one of the founding members of Bridge Repertory Theater, makes one vividly aware of the consortium of collaborating young theater artists who have labored to create the supportive contextual embrace for engaging dramas like these. In The Launch Prize, the depiction of bitter rivalries occurs on a stage provided here by that wonderful new consortium, a sardonic and witty construction that reminds one how fortunate it is to have great and supportive collaboration among artists, and how easily it might be otherwise.

– BADMan