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Masthead
A CurtainUp Feature
An Annotated List of Plays about Art and Artists Reviewed at Curtainup
By Elyse Sommer
My recent book and film fare has been highlighted by offerings about the art world. The film Woman in Gold starred the eminently watchable Helen Mirren as an elderly California shop keeper Maria Altman who spent years to reclaim the famous Gustave Klimt painting stolen (along with other Klimts) from her family by the Nazis. Hannah Rothschild's The Improbability of Love also takes its title from a painting, this one fictional but by a very much real painter by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Like Mirren's real-life character, the author of the novel, a debut, is descended from a prominent Jewish family. Rothschild has managed to not only give us a fascinating inside look at what goes on in the international high end auction world and how the provenance of a painting is established but has created a multi-faceted caper with a fascinating cast of characters that includes the very painting at its center.
A film of Rothschild's page turner has already been commissioned (by Amazon). While the movie about the Klimt Golden Lady painting worked by focusing on just one part of Anne-Marie O'Connor's four part book, Rothschild's novel really needs to dramatize the entire mix of art caper and romance. I think even the current theater world's star-minimalist director Ivo Van Hove would have trouble staging it all. This got me to thinking about the many stories about art, artists, and the art world generally that have been presented in the theater. And so, this annotated list of plays and musicals that have been reviewed at Curtainup. Like our similar page about Science and Math plays, the links are in alphabetical order and we'll be updating the list as new suitable titles crop up.
Andy: A Popera
This grand, silly, and outrageous celebration of Andy Warhol was also a meditation on art, fame and mortality. The show's aims could be traced waaay back before Warhol to grand old visionaries like Appia and Wagner, who long ago promoted a vibrant unity in the arts. Our critic who reviewed it in Philadelphis found it something very special, a true collaborative effort.
Animals Out of Paper
The always interesting playwright Rajiv Joseph here brought the audience into the world of origami as a highly sophisticated art form rather than as a fun paper craft. He cleverly used paper folding as a new metaphor through which to examine the meaning of life, likening the folding process to the way life's joys and hurts fold into each other. With just three actors and an interesting story this is the sort of play easy to put on by samll theaters like the Chester Theater in Massachussets where I saw it.
Another Vermeer Forgeries have long fascinated and bedeviled the art world. Rumor has it that there are at least half a dozen Mona Lisas of uncertain provenance. The twentieth century Dutch painter Hans Van Meegeren, after having his work dismissed by Holland's most prominent critic, made his fortune as a forger of paintings by his seventeenth century forbear Jan Van Vermeer. Thanks to Van Meegeren's talent for turning out faux Vermeers, the long gone artist's small but increasingly appreciated legacy grew. But the forger came acropper shortly after the end of the Second World War when he was brought up on the very serious criminal charge of having sold a Dutch National Treasure, "Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus" to Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. The only way to save his skin was to prove that what he'd sold to Gôering was a forgery. To do so his prosecutors allowed him to spend his pre-trial incarceration duplicating his forgery. It is this tense episode that is the focus of Bruce J. Robinson's play which unfortunately suffered from poor characterization of the lead character.
Art Yasmina Reza's canny comedy is probably the most successful art-related play of the last couple of decdes. It's about three men whose friendship is severely tested by an inanimate fourth character, a white painting. That painting is more Andy Warhol/Schnabel/Seinfeld than Rembrandt/Vermeer/Shakespeare. It may not be a masterpiece but Reza has masterfully used it to explore the art of friendship. It's been translated into 20 languages.
Bakersfield Mist in New Jersey, and in London
This is another spare, easy to produce play. Stephen Sachs uses every rummage sale and musty antique shop browser's dream of stumbling upon a valuable masterpiece, to set up what is essentially a debate between a snobby professional art historian/connoiseur and a boozy,unemployed woman who thinks she's bought a valuable Jackson Pollock at a yard sale. It's an amusing piece that challenges our perception about whether anyone can really know what is great art of whether art isn't ultimately in the eye of the beholder?
Bauer
This is a variation of the popular category of plays about famous artists. Though during the 1930s in his native Germany Rudolph Bauer was hailed as the next Wassily Kandinsky and art historians recognize his influence on modernists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he nevertheless died a mostly forgotten artist. But while Rothko is well known, that's less likely to be the case for Rudolf Bauer (1989-1953); that is, unless you saw the recent PBS documentary Betrayal: The Life and Art of Rudolf Bauer on WNET-Thirteen. Yet, during the 1930s in his native Germany Bauer was hailed as the next Wassily Kandinsky and art historians recognize his influence on the establishment of the Guggenheim Museum and on modernists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. He nevertheless died a mostly forgotten artist. Lauren Gunderson, using a documentary about Bauer as a jumping off point for her own take on his story. But being a playwright not an art historian, Gunderson was less interested in the art but why he stopped making it. The result is essentially a psychological drama.
Cellini . Pulitzer Prize winning John Patrick Shanley's drama about the Renaissance Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. It begins with Cellini at 58 dictating his memoirs and then flashes back to his late thirties when his antisocial behavior and lack of humility towards his patrons hobbled his intense desire for greatness. The emphasis is on the years when his masterpiece, the bronze of Perseus, holding the head of the Medusa was placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi where it stands to this day. Not being the Perseus of Shanley's career, the play went nowhere after its Second Stage production in 2001.
Charlotte: Life? Or Theater?, Not exactly a play or a musical, but a piece of non-traditional performance art this opened at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia in 2001 at the same time as an exhibit of Charlotte Solomon's paintings at the Jewish Museum in New York. Solomon lived in Germany, then France in bad and interesting times. She documented her life, or rather her family and the people she knew, in over 1,300 gouache paintings. She painted with snatches of various pieces of music in her head, which she noted in writing as the music meant to accompany the work, her "Three-Color Opera."
The Credeaux Canvas
Keith Bunin's 2002 tragi-comedy was commissioned by Playwrights Horizon. It revolved around three us twenty-somethings of whom Winston, a painter, seems like the one most likely to realize his ambitions. It is his ability to wield a paint brush and his love affair with the work of an obscure French painter named Jean Paul Credeaux that sends these three young people's lives into a dramatic tailspin that involves a hoax. It was smething of an art-focused This Is Our Youth, though not as succesful.
Degenerate Art A stunning work by Irondale Ensemble Hitler and his right-hand art maven Joseph Goebbels, dressed in clown ruffs as they embark on their goal of keeping "culture from being infiltrated by "degenerates." Equally amusing are a series of tableaus in which the actors bring to lifesome of the offensive art (including some much publicized and denounced American art works). The comic high spot is a confrontation between the clownish Goebbels and Paul Klee. The painter's defense of the metaphor of a painted yellow cow turns interrogation into a vaudeville skit.
Divine Rivalry
Based on actual events and the 150 1meeting of Florence's artistic geniuses Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti with the republic's chancellor, Niccolo Machiavelli. Michael Kramer, a former award-winning political journalist, dramatized the story of how the arts and ambition can be manipulated for political purposes.
Embers
Catherine Gropper's bio drama about Louise Nevelson. The sculptor was was a larger-than-life personality who enjoyed great success in her lifetime. Her rummaging through New York's trash for her art materials and her flamboyant style of dress caused the critic Robert Hughes to describe her as ""a cross between Catherine the Great and a bag lady." Stuffed with references to art world luminaries. See also Edward Albee's The Occupant.
Girl With a Pearl Earring
Tracy ChevThe fiction is that Griet, the very modest girl of Vermeer's painting was the daughter of a painter of tiles who was employed as a maid in the Vermeer household. The assumption is that the look on Griet’s face is wide eyed and sexual and Vermeer’s wife and daughter Cornelia are jealous of the very pretty and modest girl. Consequently there's an explanation for the misty look in her eyes after one of the mistress's earrings is borrowed to complete the picture there is an explanation for the misty look in the maid’s eyes.
Goodbye My Friduchita
A bio play about the fascinating Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo. She was a person with respect to whom the intriguing symbolism of her art was in constant competition with the extreme reality of her existence. Most everything, it seems, was a compromise between pain and joy as she spent much of her brief life (she died at age 47) suffering from the consequences of a terrible school bus accident. Delores C. Sendler's play is a wonderful lesson in appreciating her art in the context of her life. For another play about Kalo see La Casa Azul below.
The Highest Yellow
One of several art-related musicals. This one with music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa details Vincent van Gogh's relationship with Felix Rey, the doctor who treated him after cut off his ear. This tumultuous period in the painter's life was also one when he embarked on a massive creative explosion, shutting himself off from the world to protect his creativity, nurturing his muse like a monk.
Impressionism
Michael Jacobs neatly linked his rather pedestrian plot and his characters' hangups to four key paintings popping up and down on the walls of its setting, an art gallery that periodically metamorphose into flashback locations.
La Casa Azul 2002 London La Casa Azul
Another biographical piece about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, this onewritten by the French Canadian actress Sophie Faucher, often showing Kalo's husband, Diego Riverapainting four, times life size murals. A great opportunity to see an artist working on a famous painting in its embryonic stage.
Line Our London critic found Timberlake Wertenbaker's 2009 play about the French impressionist painter Edward Degas and his pupil Suzanne Valadon a promising idea that didn't work for her the way The Pitman Painters (see below) did.
Lobster Alice In 1946 Walt Disney commissioned Spanish avant-garde artist Salvador Dali to create an animation based on one of his songs. Dali spent six months in Hollywood and playwright Kira Obolensky took a leaf from his surreal book in imagining the sub-text. Dali, who is the only historic character in the play, alternates flaming artistic temperament with a gentle astuteness towards the fictional John Finch an assiduous animator and company man.
Modigliani
Dennis McIntyre's bio-drama Amadeo Modigliani that also features his carousing buddies Chaim Soutine and Maurice Utrillo, all outsiders in the Paris art world of 1917. And, not to be overlooked, is the much talked about but never seen ultimate insider, Pablo Picasso. An earlier production fared better than the revival we saw.
The Most Deserving
Catherine Trieschmann explores the politics of arts organizations. The play is set in a small, provincial art gallery in Ellis County, Kansas, where the Ellis County Arts Council is in a debate about who will receive a twenty-thousand dollar Living Wage Grant.
Museum
Tina Howe's 1978 satire of the modern art world features 42 characters and takes place on the final day of a modern art exhibit on the third floor of a renowned but unnamed Manhattan art museum. The exhibit, entitled "The Broken Silence" consists of four all-white (in short, blank) paintings and a group of small, decorative but menacing constructions scattered around the room It's been popular on the regional and college circuit and As Howe explained in her author's note for the play's premiere at the Shakespeare Festival, her large cast of characters was created to provide directors and producers with endless staging possibilities. Well worth seeing if it ever comes to a theater near you.
My Name is Asher Lev— Off-Broadway in Philadelphia and at Barrington Stage
The artist here happens to bean orthodox Jew who must face being disowned by the orthodox community because of a series of paintings entitled "Brooklyn Crucifixion." Adapted from Chaim Potok's novel ob the same name this is a powerful play about "aesthetic blindness" which has been produced numerous times.
Edward Albee's Occupant
This play about art world super star sculptor Louise Nevelson had its long delayed opening in 2008. Nevelson's own success as an artist was delayed much longer than this play. While she always worked as an artist, her breakthrough with the incredible all black and all white wood sculptures that are most often associated with her name, didn't come until she was close to social security age. And so, Albee's tribute to her perseverance and talent —- and, yes, her enormous ego — is not just a bio-drama but a rumination on knowing how to figure out how to become the best we can be.
The Old Masters
Reputation might prove to have a higher value than the price a piece of art work can fetch in Simon Gray's "back stage" look at two art world power brokers,Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen. The play set in 1937 florence when they formed a partnership that could take the art world by storm. Duveen, an expert in the "old masters" wants Berenson, an expert on Renaissance art and the final word when it comes to attributing works to their artists, to authenticate "The Adoration of the Shepherds" and thus increase its value, and consequentially, the commission he would receive.
On the Ceiling,
Nigel Planer's two-hander has a couple of artisans — the master plasterer Lapo and his apprentice Loti — provide the professional expertise which enables Michelangelo to put into practice his grand artistic ideas for painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican. These unsung heroes, apparently based on real people, do all the graft while Michelangelo gains all the glory. It's a sideways look at the creation of one of the great masterpieces of Western art, from the point of view of the forgotten "little men" in the shadows of art history, -- a sort of Renaissance art equivalent of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek
Athol Fugard is one of our most successful contemporary playwrights. Yet he feels a close kinship to outsider artists, as most recently expressed in his terrific play about Nukain Mabusa who for years worked as a farm laborer, painting on the rocks on a dusty hillside of the farm community of Revolver Creek. One of the play's most dramatic scenes shows a painting actually being created. The "canvas" is the biggest rock in that garden which Nukain somehow found himself unable to work on until Bokkie, his 11-year-old ward, shows up with a wagon full of paint cans to challenge and assist him to finally do so. Into the painting on that big rock Fugard has embedded the theme and essence of his dramatic faction.
Painting Churches One of the three characters in this 1983 Tina Howe play is a painter. The churches of the title are not buildings for a landscape she's painting, but her parents who she apparently wants to preserve in an idealized portrait. Thus, this is not really a play about the craft of painting but uses portrait painting as a device to let us know more about the people being painted.
Permanent Collection
Thomas Gibbons's play about a little known art foundation whose autocratic founder, Alfred Morris, has passed away and bequeathed controlling interest of the foundation to Haywood, a historically black university. That Alfred Morris was white and his foundation is located in a white suburban neighborhood factor into the play's proceedings. That Mr. Morris was an anti-art establishment visionary, who snubbed the art world and its, in his view, limiting vision of art's generational and geographical scope, also factors into the play's conflict; for example, in a Barnes' exhibit a Modigliani would be beside an African sculpture, because Barnes felt that the artist had been inspired by African work.
A Picasso
Picasso has shown up in quite a few play. In Jeffrey Hatcher's world in microcosm we get a glimpse of Pablo Picasso in Paris during World War II being interrogated by a fictional government representative, Miss Fischer. A beautiful woman obsessed with art whose mission is to impel Picasso to authenticate one of three unsigned paintings to represent him in Goebbels' burning of "decadent" art.
Picasso at the Lapin Agile
Steve Martin's smart two character comedy ranks high on the hit parade of often produced art-related . The story is a fantasy in which Picasso, Einstein and others meet in a bar before Picasso's and Einstein's larger fame sets in. Steve Martin said in '96: "It's really about how exciting it is when you're on the verge of something." What they are on the verge of is the Twentieth Century and Picasso is on the verge of his Rose Period.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde's story is one of the most durable art-related stories on the page, screen and stage.The press release for a production we reviewed caled it a "Gothic melodrama." Most video sellers categorize it as a horror film stores put the film version in the "Horror" section. Oscar Wilde warneed readers in the prologue that "those who go beneath the surface [of art] do so at their peril."
Pitmen Painters Lee Hall's adaptation of William Feaver's book, Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group 1934-1984 was one of my all-time favorite fact-inspired art play. Hall's play was a fictionilized version of the remarkable true story of a group of miners from Ashington in Northumberland, most of whom left schol at eleven, who are enrolled in an art appreciation class sponsored by the Workers' Educational Association. Under the tutelage of a college art lecturer,they emerged from knowing nothing about art, to themselves dabbling in paints, to winning acclaim as an artists' collective, aptly named the Ashington Group.
Poets'Garden
John Allee & Gary Matankyi's musical set n the small provincial village of Arles, France where Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin briefly shared a house and a model. That model, innkeeper's wife Marie Ginoux took center stage in Van Gogh as "The Arlesienne" and Gauguin's "The Night Café at Arles". While the music was better than the play, the librettos focus on the effect the artists have on their repressed and yearning model was an intriguing concept.
Posterity
Doug Wright's 2015 play brought together two of Norway's most famous men: Playwright Henrik Ibsen and Sculptor Gustav Vigeland, prompted by a commission for Vigeland to make a commemorative bust of the aging and ailing Ibsen. It's a commission Vigeland is reluctant to take on and that Ibsen is just as reluctant to pose for. For Vigeland the commission means that he must put aside a monumental masterpiece he's working on. For Ibsen, this represents a lack of appreciation for his work. ("Two dozen plays! Apparently that's insufficient to guarantee me a place in the public's memory. No. I must be lionized in some god-forsaken park, where not the people but the pigeons will offer their accolades. This is what they call a tribute.")
Private Jokes, Public Places
Architecture straddles several disciplines, among them art. This is the first in a trilogy of architecturally themed plays by Oren Safdie, son of famous architect Moshe Safdie It's a comic examination of the meaning and purpose of modern architecture. Despite its subject, Safdie aimed to hit home with anyone who's been caught up in the manipulative gamesmanship and pretentious insider gobbledygook of specialized academia. We also reviewed the second play in the series, The Bilbao Effect
Radiant Baby Another art-connected musical, this one with a book by Stuart Ross, music by Debra Barsha and lyrics by Ira Gasman, Barsha and Ross animated Keith Haring's hieroglyphic pop art images with music and dancing. While it didn't have the legs to carry it to Broadway, as the Public Theater's more recent musicals have, it was a hot ticket during its run at the Newman Theater where Hamilton and Fun Home premiered.
Red
Though the four Seasons Restaurant for which it was commissioned turned out not to be "place of reflection and safety" that he envisioned, the two-hander by John Logan won the 2010 Tony for Best Play. The production's highlight showed Rothko and his assisting actually creating one of those big paintings.A knockout scene!
Restoration
Playwright/performer Claudia Shear uses the conservator's art to fashion a serio-comic play. The New York Theatre Workshop gave it an elegantly staged production and Shear stuck to the facts pertaining to the restoration of Michaelangelo's David statue for Florence's 2004 celebration of its 500th anniversary, at the same time turning it into a story of personal restoration by stepping into the shoes of the real artisan, Cinzia Parnigoni.
Rossetti's Circle
In Anne Hulegard plany ineteenth century poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti has a plan to move forward by moving back. He wants to rescue art from its bourgeois conventions and take it back to the purity and iconic colors of the medieval period. His Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is anathema to the establishment painters of his day and, like many artists, his work was not admired until after his death, which may have been caused by an overdose of laudanum, the drug of choice of that period. The "circle" of the title is a fervent group of young artists who clustered around the iconoclastic figure of Rossetti. Seifert), who marries Morris but is obsessed by Rossetti.
The Secret of Mme Bonnard's Bath
Israel Horovitz's intriguing exploration into why Pierre Bonnard painted some 300 pictures showing his wife in or near her bathtub speculated on the issue of artistic property rights. The drama took root in the playwright's mind from an overheard Bonnard anecdote. It seems a sleeping Paris museum guard woke up to find an old man, who turned out to be Bonnard, painting over one of his paintings. Bonnard, as portrayed here, felt that he should be free to alter it even though it had been acquired for display by a museum. I would have liked to see this charming little play to have more of a life
Sight Unseen
When Sight Unseen made its 1992 debut at the Off-Broadway Orpheum Theater, also under the auspices of MTC, it ran for just 103 performances but it did win a well-deserved Obie for Best New American play for Donald Margulies. We had a chance to see it again at the Biltmore, their Broadway venue and found it was well worth reviving. It falls within the genre of plays about painters — in this case a successful American painter. The plot detours from a London retrospective of his work to a visit to the lover he hasn't seen for fifteen years in the spartan farmhouse where she lives and works with her archeologist husband. But that only hints at the conflicted feelings that simmer beneath the initially polite interchanges as Margulies plunges his characters into the more controversial subtexts about race and modern art. We also reviewed a 2009 revival in New Jersey
Stanley
this was one of the 1997 Broadway season's most stunningly staged and rivetingly acted plays. The title character is the real Stanley Spencer who was accused of pornography at one point in his career but eventually revered for the way he used his own small village of Cookham-on-Thames in Berkshire as inspiration for cubist-realist paintings of erotic subjects bathed in an aura of spirituality.
Sunday in the Park With George.
This Publitzer Prize winner is one of my favorite Sondheim musicals. It vividly "had Georges Seurat's classic pointillist painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte come to life. Sondheim's fictional account takes the audience through the construction of this intricate painting and examines the people that contribute to it. Curtainup also reviewed it in Philadelphia and would welcome another Broadway revival.
Tatjana in Color: The Trial of Egon Schiele
Julia Jordan dramatized the events surrounding the real 1912 trial of Egon Schiele for corrupting the morals of a twelve-year-old girl, by making that girl, Tatjana von Mossig, her play's pivotal character. While Schiele and his model and mistress, Wally Neuzill (also based on an actual person), are crucial to the aura and details of the plot, they are trigger characters. What Ms. Jordan is after is their effect on the rebellious, impressionable, hormonally charged pre-teen. Schiele's studio in the town of Neulengbach, Austria, some twenty miles from Vienna, was actually something of a hangout for a number of the pubescent girls who willingly posed for his Freud-influenced, psychologically probing paintings.
Ten Unknowns
Jon Robin Baitz's stimulating 2001 play's finds its central figure Malcom Raphelson, living a art world he left behind for a reclusive existence many years after being part of a New York exhibit of ten promising young painters. That hermit's studio turns into a lively forum for debate about the debasement of culture and confrontation about credit given and withheld for creative assistance. The story line, typical of other Baitz plays, relied more on character revelations than action, though those revelations contain as many surprises as any mystery plot. I found it one of Baitz's best plays
Vincent in Brixton The substance of Nicholas Wright's play is part fact, part conjecture. What was it that made Vincent van Gogh into a great painter? Does genius go hand in hand with mental instability? On record are the letters, wonderfully descriptive of nature and plants and trees, that Vincent exchanged with his younger brother Theo, and something mysteriously referred to by Vincent's parents as the "secrets at the Loyers". At the age of sixteen, Vincent van Gogh followed his father and uncles into the art dealing business by taking a post at Goupil and Co. in The Hague, Holland. In 1873 aged twenty he was transferred to work in the London branch of the gallery where he stayed for two years.
