Art

Play (1994)
by Yasmina Reza
Translated by Christopher Hampton
Directed by Courtney O’Connor
Lyric Stage Company of Boston
Copley Square area, Boston
February 21 – March 16, 2025

Scenic Design: Shelley Barish; Lighting Design: Elmer Martinez

With Remo Airaldi (Yvan), Michael Kaye (Serge), John Kuntz (Marc)

The play opens with Marc stating to the audience: My friend Serge has bought a painting. It’s a canvas about five foot by four: white. The background is white and if you screw up your eyes., you can make out some fine white diagonal lines.

Serge, a dermatologist, has bought an almost entirely white painting for a huge amount of money. Upon looking at the painting, his long-term friend Marc declares that it is white shit. Gravely wounded, Serge seeks the counsel of his and Marc’s mutual dear friend Yvan, who in a wishy-washy way coddles Serge and accepts some sense of value in the painting. But so ensue a series of discussions among the friends behind one another’s backs about their characters and their capacities for friendship. As well, Yvan is set to be married, but faces a lot of dilemmas about his upcoming wedding, notably about which of his and his wife’s parents and stepparents should appear on the invitation, and he is in a severely anxious state over the whole thing. Meanwhile, Marc has a wife whom Serge can’t stand and Serge lets Marc know about it. The challenge of the friendships, the opposition of views about art, and the stresses over life choices conspire to lead to a catharsis about the art and the friendships.

What a wonderful production this is, of a great play that I have seen and read numerous times. The superficial simplicity of the setup hides a deep narrative complexity and it takes a wonderful cast and director to fish it all out and make it both seriously comic and poignantly dramatic. The play is truly a dramatic comedy in the best sense – full of sharpness, wit, merciless barbs, and tons of laughs – which lead, ultimately, to a crisis of relationship which is heartbreaking, and treated, in the end, in a heartbreakingly beautiful way.

Director Courtney O’Connor has given a wonderful reading here, and has a terrific roster of actors to realize it.

John Kuntz, the great Boston comic actor known for many roles at Actors’ Shakespeare Project over the years, gives an incisive and penetrating account of Marc. His nuanced elocution of each phrase mixed with potently comic pauses invoke a gravitas infused with sarcastic hilarity that work beautifully together to give great power to the role.

As Serge, the purchaser of the painting, Michael Kaye does a terrific job as the pretentious nouveau protector of contemporary aesthetics, but Kaye opens the character up so that the pretensions, and his trajectory of vulnerabilities towards Marc, become increasingly evident.

And in the role of Yvan, the putatively nebbishy all-over-the-place character incapable of saying what he wants or likes, Remo Airaldi, a former long-time member of the company at the American Repertory Theater, gives a great squooshy heartfelt account that makes Yvan’s potential crackups and hopeful gazings at stability all the more potent and affecting. His rendering of the long speech in the middle of the play in which he details all of the problems in his upcoming wedding is done with expert articulation and careful detailing. In other productions, that speech is often reeled off at top speed, which indeed has comic effect but which leaves the audience racing to understand all of the complexities. Here, Airaldi gives this extended neurotic declamation an appealingly cadenced and warmly curated tone, making it comprehensible.

This is a production with tons of laughs, and, if you are like me, some honest tears. There is nothing in this production that holds one at arm’s length – it is intimate, penetrating and full of both fun and poignancy.

In addition, the largely white (appropriately so!) set by Shelley Barish is simple but eloquent and perfectly sets the background for what ensues, and the lighting design by Elmer Martinez is inventive and perfectly to the point, and, with its highly coordinated punctuation, helps divide the many interleaved scenes into manageable and digestible elements.