REVIEWS ...
Tuesday, February 11, 2004
'Ten Unknowns' paints a jungle around aging American artist
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Jon Robin Baitz writes plays in which moral weightiness is offset by buoyant wit, with storytelling fueled by solid scholarship and an edgy intelligence.
In Ten Unknowns, Baitz turns his attention to the art world, exploring the politics, manipulation and trendiness that can help launch or obliterate careers. Now at GableStage, the play tracks the turbulence that three younger people bring to the heretofore peaceful self-exile of an aging American painter.
Malcolm Raphelson (Dennis Carrig) was, in 1949, one of "Ten Unknowns," a rising figurative painter whose style and left-leaning politics had coalesced around government-sponsored art projects. After the tide of Abstract Expressionism rendered him unfashionable, Malcolm decamped for a rundown house near a lake in Mexico, there to drink and womanize as his artistic drive dried up.
As the play begins, it's 1992, and Malcolm is a handsome man in his early 70s. It's entirely believable that he would be awaiting the arrival of Julia Bryant (Deborah L. Sherman), a young Berkeley grad student and ecologist, with vague ideas of seduction on his mind.
Malcolm is clearly smart, strong-willed, infinitely capable of irony and surliness, as we see in his exchanges with art dealer Trevor Fabricant (Heath Kelts).
A South African who swims with the sharks of the New York art world, Trevor is convinced he can make both Malcolm and himself piles of money, if only he can get a "rediscovered" Malcolm to turn out enough new work to flesh out a retrospective show.
To that end, Trevor has dispatched his former lover, painter Judd Sturgess (Nicholas Richberg), to serve as Malcolm's assistant -- really, to get the older artist working on Trevor's timetable. And despite the fact that Judd is struggling to get beyond the clubbing and drug use that shaped his New York life, despite Malcolm's tendency to toss off the odd condescending remark about gay men, the artist-assistant relationship seems to be flourishing.
The work is coming, and it's good. But it's the process of creation, the balance between Malcolm's work and Judd's, that cuts to the moral heart of Ten Unknowns.
At GableStage, where design matches the ambitions of the art, these tensions are played out on Tim Connelly's authentic-looking set, an artist's studio with cracked, bold blue walls and what seems to be years' worth of paint spatters on its ancient wood floor. Outside the room's narrow windows, Jeff Quinn's lighting picks out an unkempt jungle, and when sound designer Michael J. Hoffmann turns on the drumming of a storm, you'll wish you'd brought your umbrella.
Director Joseph Adler keeps the action moving at an impassioned pace, drawing strong performances from all four actors, whose characters are reflected in Estela Vrancovich's costumes -- latter-day hippie for the ever-eager Julia (who spends long moments of the play half-naked as she poses topless for Malcolm), trendy suits and accessories for uptight Trevor, paint-spattered T-shirt and pants for Judd, a casual stylishness for Malcolm.
One of Baitz's many themes in Ten Unknowns deals with young people, new talents, inevitably supplanting those who came before them. Unintentionally, perhaps, this theme is reflected in the way Carrig and Richberg portray their characters. Carrig's Malcolm is a foul-mouthed curmudgeon with rusty seductive skills. Richberg's Judd, on the other hand, lights up the room -- and the theater -- every moment that he's onstage.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Ten Unknowns at GableStage
By Tony Guzman, Critic at Large
GableStage's season continues with the South Florida premiere of Jon Robin Baitz' provocative meditation on the existential quandaries of contemporary life as seen through the lens of the art world, Ten Unknowns, originally staged in 2001 at the Lincoln Center Theatre in a production starring Donald Sutherland.
It's a play so wide-ranging in themes and ethical implications it's hard to summarize succinctly. It's 1992 and we're dropped into the backwater artist's studio in Central Mexico (nicely rendered by set designer Tim Connelly) of expatriate painter Malcolm Raphelson. Once a social realist wunderkind of great promise who exhibited in a group show entitled Ten Unknowns of 1949, Raphelson and his figurative painting fellow-travelers were washed away to virtual oblivion by the rising tide of Abstract Expressionism in the fifties (a CIA plot, a program note from director Joe Adler argues pretty cogently - as if we didn't have enough to be paranoid about!). Enter South African art dealer Trevor, who's stumbled upon his work and plans a triumphal return to the big time for our now deeply conflicted and heretofore fairly content-to-be-marginalized hero. On hand for the fevered soul-searching and emotional paroxysms is Judd, the brilliant but tortured and self-destructively dissolute artist's assistant supplied by Trevor, and hetero (Trevor and Judd are an item) love interest Julia, a biology grad student from Berkeley whose quixotic mission to locate and save a local frog species probably wiped out by encroaching commercial interests subtly mirrors Trevor's efforts to "save" Raphe.
All the characters search for salvation amidst the seemingly ineluctable forces of a morally bankrupt world cut off from any genuine values. Is the only viable answer Raphe's Thoreau-like rejection of the ways of the herd, or might the possibility of fighting back and winning out over the PC and PR-imposed power structure be doable after all? Can you play the game without being its prisoner?
Adler has assembled a marvelous cast that hadn't quite gelled as an ensemble by opening night, but that should be hitting on all cylinders by the time you read this. Although he doesn't give us much in the way of Raphelson's inner life, Dennis Carrig, who reminds one rather of a low-key Kris Kristopherson with a dash of Nick Nolte, has a comfortable-in-his-own-skin centeredness that succeeds in grounding the production in emotional honesty. As Trevor, Heath Kelts relies a bit too much on his facility in playing a humorous twit in the early going, but turns in a performance of real power and conviction by the end, perhaps the best of his career. Charismatic young Nicholas Richberg gives us a fascinating Judd, touching all the bases compellingly from arch humor to anguished despair. Deborah L. Sherman, perhaps the finest young actress in these parts when it comes to conveying an intense inner life, conveys Julia's brains and bite - as well as her requisite ingénue appeal.
Ten Unknowns is the kind of contemporary play we've come to rely so much on Joe Adler for: not only engrossing and entertaining but thought-provoking in a way relevant to one's own life - as in: What do I really stand for? and What do I do now?
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Arte Americano
Fleeing the New York art scene, an expatriate painter finds himself right back in gringolandia
By Ronald Mangravite
Ars longa, vita brevis, goes the old Roman saying, and it remains true today. While decades and centuries come and go, art endures. The tumult of prerevolutionary Russia is by now a dim memory, but Chekhov's plays remain to recall the era. So it is with the plays of Jon Robin Baitz, an expatriate South African whose tales of and about New York City at the turn of the 21st Century may linger long after that just-passed era turns into a chapter of history. His plays are filled with educated, anxiety-ridden professionals aware of their failings but unsure of what to do about them. Like Chekhov's characters, Baitz's people seem mired in indecision and self-doubt, maintaining façades of urbanity that mask raw passions -- desire and fear foremost. This pattern continues in Baitz's Ten Unknowns, now in its Florida premiere at GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel. Set in a small Mexican village in 1992, the play serves up some interesting, flawed characters and witty conversation while posing a number of ethical dilemmas. Although those seeking dramatic action may come away disappointed, Joseph Adler's evocative production makes for an evening of thoughtful, insightful theater.
The story line is simple, perhaps overly so. Trevor Fabricant, a nervous New York art dealer, has stumbled on a poster of a 1949 art show featuring "Ten Unknowns," up-and-coming artists. One of these was one Malcolm Raphelson, now an aging painter of landscapes and the human figure whose career ended abruptly with the onset of Abstract Expressionism. Trevor manages to find Raphelson, who left the country for Mexico in the early 1960s, living there in obscurity ever since. Hoping to prod Raphelson to create new works for a retrospective exhibition in New York, Trevor sends his ex-lover, Judd Sturgess, an aspiring but frustrated young artist, to be Raphelson's assistant. Meanwhile Raphelson takes up with Julia Bryant, a Berkeley-trained biologist who is studying the extinction of a subspecies of frogs in the area.
When Trevor arrives at the artist's colorful, shambling studio, he finds Raphelson strangely ambivalent to Trevor's efforts to revive his career. Julia encourages Raphelson to work with Trevor but then discovers a strange psychological war under way between the artist and his assistant and a long-buried secret that is tormenting them both. The story, which offers an intriguing insider look at the modern art scene, unfolds in a series of pointed, brilliant conversations. Ideas crackle and spark in Ten Unknowns, as the subject matter leaps from media manipulation of fame to the nature of authenticity to the proper ethical response to eco-disaster. The conversations barrel along, referencing Hemingway, Dante, Diego Rivera, J.M.W. Turner, and New York-centric minutiae. If you can keep up with this high-flying talk, you'll have a grand time, but like his characters, Baitz isn't too keen on letting anyone else in on the details. You either know where and what NoHo is or you don't. Still Baitz's dialogue is peppered with sharp quips and epigrams. When Trevor wants Raphelson's new painting to be large enough to make an impact on a gallery wall, Judd accuses him of being "a size queen." Gruff, ursine Raphelson growls about the new popularity of his once-sleepy village, now besieged by "bus tours, traveling pederasts, and Texans." All of this makes for thoughtful, often dryly funny writing, but it doesn't translate into gripping theater. Like Chekhov, Baitz is playing on the fringes of human experience, not portraying its essential struggles. Several significant plot points are discussed after the fact, and often, again as with Chekhov, over food and drink. Conversation is king in Ten Unknowns, and if you like that sort of thing, you'll be pleased. If not, well ...
As is the norm with GableStage, Adler's direction is clear and effective, balancing the colorful, romantic feel of the Mexican setting with a darker sensibility. Tim Connelly's studio set, with vibrant, saturated Mexican colors and huge ceiling beams, and Jeff Quinn's moody lighting ably abet the production's mood. The cast is solid if uneven. As Raphelson, Dennis Carrig brings a veteran performer's ease and a striking, silvery look that befits the role. What's missing, though, is a certain charisma that might explain why all the other characters are willing to subjugate themselves to him. The text doesn't offer any demonstration of this power -- no scene or sequence where Raphelson could wow the audience. Without star power, the other characters' actions make less sense. Adler and Carrig set up Raphelson as an artist without a mask -- he is who he is. This Raphelson isn't fighting to keep up appearances, so the production lacks a moment of unmasking -- when all pretenses are stripped away.
Unmasking is also the key to the role of Judd and, in this, Nicholas Richberg does well as the insecure, sneering assistant, ever ready with a quip. Richberg's Judd starts off as a smug loner but later is revealed to be a tormented, conflicted soul, caught up in a codependent nightmare, an unsettling descent that Richberg tracks nicely. Deborah L. Sherman does well as Julia, the brainy chatterbox, but she has to pull extra weight with the weakest-written role in the play -- some extended character confessions seem to leap out of nowhere. It's in the role of Trevor that Baitz finds his stride and perhaps his alter ego. Trevor is an insecure expatriate caught up in the New York art scene, walking a tightrope between high-society éclat and financial disaster. Heath Kelts is superb in the role, delivering a complex palette of primary and secondary colors. In one memorable sequence, ex-lover Judd makes a joking suggestion about quickie sex to Trevor while in the presence of the other characters. The series of emotional responses Trevor goes through -- from surprise to doubt to glee to embarrassment -- is priceless.
Baitz always has a flair for character, but he has a real lock on Trevor, who like Baitz is marginalized by his sexuality and his ethnic and national identities -- the ultimate expatriate. He continues to depict an uprooted, restless sensibility -- the obsession with public image, the lonely search for emotional connection, the thirst for authenticity. Ten Unknowns isn't gripping theater, but it's elegant and unpatronizing, and GableStage's decision to produce it is in itself something of an affirmation. Not so long ago, Adler's company was one of the few voices for provocative, challenging theater in South Florida, when the common wisdom was that only rehashed musicals and revues would work here. Now that more companies have followed that lead, a local audience of literate, demanding playgoers appears to be gaining momentum.
