Art

Play(1994)
by Yasmina Reza

With Victor Shopov (Serge), John Geoffrion (Marc), Bob Mussett (Yvan)

There’s an abundance of Art riches in Boston this season.

Arts After Hours in Lynn just produced the play recently in a lovely, intimate production, and now the Hub Theatre Company of Boston, yet again, has a stunning, intimate production in Back Bay.

This production, excellently directed by Daniel Bourque, and superbly acted as well by Victor Shopov, John Geoffrion and Bob Mussett, has the additional feature of some particularly effective lighting and sound embellishments.

At various points, a blue glow highlights the perimeter of the all-white painting. At other times, there are sudden flashes summoning the transitions. And there are remarkable, and sometimes startling charges of sound that mark those moments as well. It’s very effective and lighting designer Chris Bocchiaro and sound designer Kyle Lampe are to be credited with those dramatic and very effective staging puctuations.

Played in the center of a surrounding audience on three sides, the three roles, realized exquisitely by Victor Shopov (Serge), John Geoffrion (Marc) and Bob Mussett (Yvan), create a space of amazing brilliance and psychological intensity as they go through their hour and a half dance.

Purportedly an ongoing argument about the value of contemporary minimalist art, the play is actually about relationship – that between friends and that between the viewer and the viewed. The play offers a curious and highly fertile series of suggestions about meaning. In effect, it tells us that meaning is constructed in a space, not merely found, that the significance of minimalist art is its capacity, by virtue of simplicity and apparent vacuum of meaning, to draw all sorts of responses out of us. That network of responses, then, as opposed to a singular artistic intention, is what constitutes the meaning of such work.

Reza is a masterful playwright and she specializes, in a way, in the embrace of conflict. Art is the first and pre-eminent example of her capacity to do this with gusto and panache, and she later demonstrates it in God of Carnage (2006), a play purportedly about two couples discussing their children’s loaded interaction on a playground. Like Art, God of Carnage is also a wonderful example of a blow-up out of seeming nothing, and which vividly and articulately demonstrates how intensity and ardor get out of hand.

The performances in Hub’s Art are really exquisite.

Victor Shopov’s Serge, donned in Ascot tie and full of an evolved self-certainty, is wonderfully commanding and effete all at once. He is not implausibly ridiculous, but just affected enough to tease us a bit. We don’t quite know whether to laugh with him or at him, and that is precisely the point of the role and Shopov carries that ambiguity off beautifully.

Marc, played with a clear, sharp and pointed demeanor by John Geoffrion (also the Artistic Director of Hub Theatre Company), is the perfect foil for Shopov’s Serge. He, too, is a strong character, but as recalcitrant in his unwillingness to see any value in Serge’s new painting as Serge is to see anything but value. They are a great pair, and sparks fly when these two actors sharpen their knives and go at one another.

In the middle is poor Yvan, schlubby and ineffective in all sorts of ways, but who in some fashion represents the heart and soul of the play. Caught between extremes among his friends and in his disastrous marital preparations, he signifies the inability to take a stance, evidenced by his inclination to just look blandly at the whiteness of Serge’s painting and to go along with whomever is sounding off at the moment. That he comes to crisis and begins to realize something (he’s also the only one in therapy) is an indication of the power Reza sees in such conflicted interactions and their capacity to produce growth, however painful.

Remarkably, for such a minimalist and somewhat abbreviated play, I always am moved by the final scene in which Marc, having gone the distance in some sense, regards Serge’s painting and re-describes the painting that he describes at the outset of the play. It is a simple touch, a narrative gesticulation that is superficially minor but which I find oddly cathartic. John Geoffrion carries off the moment with great power and beauty, the perfect and riveting capstone to a beautifully executed production.

For all performances, Hub Theatre Company has a pay what you can policy, a truly great deal for theater of this caliber.

– BADMan