What Makes Theater Art?
tg STAN & Dood Paard present Art by Yasmina Reza
By Ally Gravina
As the audience mills about with the houselights still on, three men who will soon reveal themselves to be the characters in a raucous, experimental version of Yasmina Reza’s Art, roll a tarp-covered trailer onto the stage. Instructing the audience to continue talking among ourselves — “We will begin in seven minutes,” one of them says. “Something happened and we will tell you about that later.” — they retrieve items from the trailer and put up the set for the play.
Art is reborn right in front of our eyes.
Twenty-four years since Art first premiered at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the collaborating companies tg STAN (from Belgium) and Dood Paard (from the Netherlands) unpack it both literally and figuratively. Their adaptation adds three new characters to Serge, Marc, and Yvan, the friends in Reza’s play: the actors themselves. Throughout the 100-minute show, Kuno Bakker, Gillis Biesheuvel, and Frank Vercruyssen repeatedly break the fourth wall, inviting us to consider who is actually having the conversations, what makes theater into art, and maybe even whether it is art.
The plot of the Tony-winning play is relatively simple. With three characters and a minimal set, Art uses the 17-year-friendship among these men to engage questions about the modern art market, aesthetic taste, and what it means to be a friend. They have conversations about everything from holistic medicine to “woman problems” to Seneca the Younger.
Serge (Bakker) is a moderately successful dermatologist who recently purchased a contemporary piece of art by the fictional artist Antrois for 200,000₣. Marc (Vercruyssen) describes it as as “white with white lines,” and he openly hates the piece. Serge adores his new painting, and Yvan (Biesheuvel) is stuck somewhere in the middle and more concerned about his friends than their opinions of a painting. Indeed, the play becomes a study of the nature and fractures of friendship as much as a contemplation of art.
The pleasure of this revamped performance lies in the care with which the actors intentionally insert themselves into the play, even improvising to incorporate aspects of the New York performances.
At FIAF, an English translation of their French dialogue appears in supertitles projected on an upstage screen and the actors sometimes glance up at those words and shrug, smirk or nod at them. If they find the supertitles accurate, they sigh in relief and take a moment to catch their breath while the translation catches up. If they fall behind the pace of the supertitles, they express annoyance over the audience already knowing what they were about to say. Though I don’t know French, I get the distinct feeling that the actors are coming up with new lines on the spot that are not translated. Sometimes, I feel left out, realizing that some of the jokes depend on knowledge of both languages. But other times, they interject funny remarks in English — so quickly that I almost feel as if I understand French.
In the middle of a heated argument Serge giggles as he calls Marc “Frank” and then “Frankie” — the actor’s name. Serge tells him that he has an ugly, American name. Both the characters and the actors are bickering at each other. I wonder if they do this bit at every performance.
The fourth wall is broken again halfway through the performance, when Yvan leaves the stage and walks around the auditorium soliciting opinions on a piece of art he is carrying. Interrupting Yvan, Marc and Serge ask us to please not touch the painting so they won’t have to wash off our germs after the show. Yvan spitefully hands the painting to a spectator, smirking back at his cast-mates.
All of these diversions from the original text of Art put the question of theatrical representation onto the same plane as the questions the play asks about contemporary painting. tg STAN and Drood Paard ask the audience to consider what distinguishes theater as art.
Many of us have probably had conversations like the ones we witness on-stage, and much of the humor comes from the familiarity of the topics, and perhaps the wish that we, too might, might complain for 10 minutes straight, as one character does, about this future mother-in-law.
But why isn’t this monologue considered theatrical when it happens in our everyday lives? tg STAN & Dood Paard’s Art asks: Is it the presence of an audience that turns the display of ordinary human interaction into art?
