Everyone's a critic

>> Art's arguments between friends feel tired and passé

by AMY BARRATT

All I can say is, they must have relied on star power in London and New York. Art, by Yasmina Reza, in its current incarnation at Centaur Theatre, is contrived and tedious. I'd also like to say that, despite being only seven years old, it's hopelessly old-fashioned; the problem with that view is that audiences all over the world have found it to be just the ticket.

Originally written in French and translated by British playwright Christopher Hampton, Art is about three friends, Serge, Marc and Yvan. The conflict between these guys, created in the opening moments of the play, is over a painting. Serge, a doctor with aspirations of being a serious art collector, has spent 200,000 francs on a canvas that Marc perceives to be "shit."

The audience loves Marc, because it too thinks the painting is shit. It's white, see. Well, maybe there are some shades of white and some texturing, but basically, "my three-year-old could do it" is what the smug spectator is saying to himself. "And this dope paid the equivalent of $43,000 for it. Let's laugh at him some more."

People love this play because it makes them feel clever and sophisticated while not challenging their attitudes one tiny bit. Remember the brouhaha a few years back over the National Gallery's purchase of Rothko's "Voice of Fire"? Art is exactly the same "debate," writ small. It's a play for people who, 50 years later, still can't deal with abstract expressionism, and don't seem to know that anything has happened in the art world since about '65. It's as if someone were to get all hot under the collar about Impressionism in 2001. Every art movement is controversial at first, but usually we get over it.

The characters in Art need to get over it and get lives. All the pointless bickering may have worked better in French, because the French really do this sort of thing for sport. Although the English text is still set in France, there is no sense that these characters are French. Except for Harry Standjofski's Yvan, they seem barely human.

Yvan is a guy I recognize: smart and funny but too fucked up to have made much of himself. I like Yvan. I don't like or know Marc or Serge.

Lubomir Mykytiuk is a decent actor in a certain kind of part, but he's so lost in this role it isn't funny. Alan Alda originated the role on Broadway and what a stroke of genius that was: casting the prototypical knee-jerk liberal as the knee-jerk conservative. There's a Woody Allen-ness to Marc too in the way he gets hold of a bone and won't stop worrying it long past the point where everyone in the room is sick of him.

Mo Bock, who plays Serge, would have been better cast as Marc. This actor's strength is in "regular guy" roles. He looks uncomfortable in Serge's bone-coloured slacks and sweater. John Dinning's white, black and grey set is the height of modernity, circa 1970. Did I mention the play is set in the present?

As it turns out, all the bickering about the painting isn't really about the painting. But by the time we find that out, we're so tired of the characters we don't really care if they can salvage their relationship or not.

Art, to Dec. 2 at Centaur Theatre, $20-36, 288-3161