Triple players

David Dukes, William Atherton, and Jack Willis
appraise the Art of friendship

by Robert von Stein Redick

Art runs through August 12 at the Ogunquit Playhouse. Call 207-646-2402.

WHITING ON THE WALL: Dukes and Atherton take their characters' conflict from personal to venomous.

Near the center of Moby Dick, Melville devotes a long, delirious chapter to the color white. In brief, he hates it. Eggshells, snow, mascara, albino sperm whales - every manifestation of whiteness is a form of treason. Why? Because whiteness, like a shroud, conceals what it envelopes. And since the sum of all visible colors is arguably a blinding white (don't quibble with the old man), nature itself is ultimately not what it seems. It is a mirage, a decoy.

Nervous Marc, a twitching bundle of insecurities played by David Dukes, tries to disagree. "You can't hate what's invisible, you can't hate nothing." But he does, vehemently, over the 80-minute course of Art, Yasmina Reza's wise, hilarious, and exquisitely funny play on stage now at Ogunquit. His idea of nothing: a large white canvas with faint diagonal scratches, purchased by his closest friend for an astronomical sum.

---

Read our exclusive interview with Judd Hirsch

---

We're in Paris, but it is a Paris of anonymous walls: three apartments belonging to three lonely men, Spartan, stripped down, no windows or cappuccino makers in sight. The buyer of the offending painting, Serge (William Ather-ton), is a dour aesthete, his passions plunged in the art world, his dark clothes and Warhol shock of hair impeccably arranged. Marc by comparison is a gruff, curly-bearded iconoclast - though no less self-consciously so. Their differences in artistic taste are something of a red herring, naturally: what is really at stake is far more primal. As he questions (jeers, ridicules) Serge's purchase, Marc believes he is defending the very heart of their 15-year friendship. In fact, as we see plainly through our winces, he is lunging with a rhetorical knife.

Caught between these two is Yvan (Jack Willis), a pudgy, self-effacing clown. Yvan is an outstanding failure: stumbling from one sad profession to another, about to marry a woman whom both his friends detest. But his worst trait soon proves to be his very generosity, which won't allow him to take sides in the pitched battle, and thus condemns all three to a kind of balanced bloodletting.

MARC: You find these colors touching, Yvan?

SERGE: He finds these colors touching! He's perfectly entitled to!

MARC: No, he's not entitled to.

YVAN: I'm not entitled to?

MARC: No . . . he's not entitled to say he finds these colors touching, because he doesn't.

YVAN: I don't . . . ?

MARC: There are no colors! You can't see them! And you don't find them touching!

That's a random slice of Reza's dialog, but an indicative one. Spare in the extreme, lacking the self-conscious wit of a Harold Pinter or a Sam Shephard, she pinpoints her characters' weak spots with merciless precision. The fact that her characters are men ought to nail shut the coffin on the silly question of one gender's ability to describe the other's intimacies.

After all, theater's top men continue to struggle for Art parts without respite. Since its 1994 Paris premier, the play has wiped the global deck of awards and seen the likes of Albert Finney, Tom Courtney, Alan Alda, Cotter Smith - and of course Judd Hirsch - fill its triangular cast. Universality, so easy to claim, so hard to substantiate, really does seem the apt word here. The Santiago, Chile, crowd with whom I first saw the play embraced it as their own, while the Bangkok Post described it as "a story not too remote from the Thai context." And there are 17 other translations out there.

Now directing the play for the first time, Hirsch has assembled an impressive trio. Two have prior experience with the play (Willis played his current role opposite Hirsch and Cotter Smith on Broadway; Dukes and Hirsch starred in separate London stagings). The only newcomer, William Atherton, is quite as satisfying as his companions.

The metronome of Art is the characters' losing battle for restraint - a restraint that might yet let them laugh off their argument and salvage their friendships. Hirsch's threesome convincingly embraces all extremes of mood. If the conciliatory moments, as when Marc tries to see the poetry in his friend's "incoherent urge" to acquire the painting, are perhaps less convincing overall, they remain more than serviceable. And they are more than offset by scenes of great chemistry and inspiration. This is particularly true in the play's final half-hour, a nonstop sequence of terrible humor (or humorous terror?) as the already-personal becomes venomous. Did I, Serge demands, looking deadpan at Marc, dismiss your new girlfriend's worth so cruelly, so out-of-hand? Did I try to replace you with her? Marc shoots back.

There were other distractions: Dukes's Marc was almost too irritable to be believed as anyone's former counselor in matters of taste. Willis on the other hand projected such a volume of energy that it was somewhat harder to credit his own particular weakness - indecision - than it needed to be. But I can't help concluding that these abrasions were mostly noticeable because of the impressive finish on the whole. Hirsch's Art offers more, both comically and dramatically, than many long, expensive evenings of large casts and all-purpose punch lines. See it for the talent, the confidence, the nerve.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.