There’s this painting, you see—no, it’s not a white-on-white abstract, and this isn’t another production of Yasmina Reza’s Art. We are in Russia, it’s 1956 and this is St. Petersburg (in those cold-war years called Leningrad), where the Hermitage Museum has just been bequeathed what MIGHT be a hitherto-undiscovered Matisse. The state-appointed experts deny the possibility, but the curator wants a second opinion (on the sly, of course). Toward this goal, he has called in an elderly woman alleged to have been ‘intimately’ acquainted with the artist himself.
As it turns out, Miss Valentina Nrovka was only a student of the famous post-Impressionist artist during the belle époque, and the father of her illegitimate daughter, a soldier who soon departed for ‘a war somewhere.’ She claims not to regret her decision to abandon the Left Bank lifestyle and return with her baby to the country where her mentor’s ‘decadent’ aesthetic will be suppressed. But when that same child—now a 30-year-old matron infected by optimism associated with the end of the Stalinist regime—seeks her mother’s blessing for her own small revolt against the status quo, it awakens ambivalent emotions in the old lady grown savvier for her experience.
Playwright David Hare saw in his 1986 play a diatribe against government censorship of artists (a crime frequently attributed to England’s then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher). So, it appears, does Vitalist Theatre director Jaclynn Jutting. Certainly, the premise offers plenty of opportunity for sniping at the world of socially-approved culture, of international politics, and of their often ill-starred convergence. But more intriguing nowadays are the individual issues it raises—personal fulfillment vs. responsibility to others, wisdom and forgiveness vs. sticking to your convictions—argued in quasi-Shavian discussions mostly comprised of Valentina swapping pronouncements with her intellectual inferiors.
Ariel Brenner delivers a majestic performance as the flinty Mme. Valentina (assisted by Eva Breneman’s impeccable dialect instruction), valiantly and selflessly supported by H. Lynn Kendziera, Mark Shallow and Robb Rabito as her various foils. The uncredited scenic design in Gorilla Tango’s cozy storefront space—a museum’s inner office decorated with replicas of pictures forbidden to its public (among them, Picasso’s Blue Guitar) —hints at the oppression lying just outside its sanctuary. With all this, who cares if Hare is dealing from a stacked deck, or that we never learn, for sure, the lineage of the canvas under scrutiny?
Playwright: David Hare. At: Vitalist Theatre at Gorilla Tango Theatre, 1919 N. Milwaukee. Phone: 773-598-4549; $20. Runs through: Feb. 10