ART

Playwright: Yasmina Reza

Translation: Christopher Hampton

Director: Courtney O’Connor

Lyric Stage Boston

February 21- March 16, 2025

Three long-time friends come to blows—perhaps—when one of them purchases a quite expensive piece of abstract art. ART is not for everyone. It’s got a peculiar plot. It’s a play of talk, more talk, and redundant talk. It’s white-on-white canvas triggers insecurities and prompts altogether too much relationship discourse. It’s a bit of Becket’s aimlessness, a bit of Ionesco’s absurdity, a bit of preciousness only the privileged can indulge. But the language is so delicious, so entrancing, that all can be excused. After all, these are not American men, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at a bar, watching some sport on a screen. These are Frenchmen. Thus we savor how they dissect themselves and their purpose and their entanglements with the same precision of teenage girls everywhere.

ART premiered in Paris in 1994, and subsequently played in London, New York, and all over the world. It’s won Moliere’s and Olivier’s and Tony’s. It’s been translated into twenty languages. It’s a contemporary masterpiece. And this production delivers all of ART’s strengths with gusto.

The set, of course, is white and spare. The men’s clothes, of course, are muted. The lighting is alternately too vague and too bright. But the acting is consistently brilliant. Remo Airaldi, Michael Kaye, and John Kuntz are three of Boston’s finest actors; each of them in full flame. The audience sits transfixed for ninety minutes as three humans try to understand themselves and their interconnections to a remarkable depth. When it’s over we are enriched in the potential and complexity of human coexistence. Then we step into our world, where everything is siloed into digestible, mostly inaccurate sound bites. And we crave ART.

Hedda Gabler

Playwright: Henrik Ibsen

Director: Danielle Fauteux Jacques

Apollinaire Theatre

February 21- March 16, 2025

If you’re hankering for a truly timeless classic, find your way into the labyrinth of angled streets known as Chelsea, climb two hefty flights up into the former Odd Fellows Hall, and enter into the candlelit shadows of Apollinaire Theatre’s production of Hedda Gabler. I’ve seen enough Ibsen to know this would be no lark in the park, but I was amazed anew at Ibsen’s insights into contemporary life. When he wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, Ibsen allowed heroine Nora to escape her stifling life, albeit at great cost. By the time Hedda comes along in 1890, she enjoys no such luck. Bored. Bursting with undirected energy. Bored. Dismissed by all except for her looks and charm. Bored. Hedda has nothing to look forward to and so—well-known spoiler alert—she takes an early exit.

Apollinaire’s production is exquisite. The set, the costumes, the pacing are all dignified, elegant, and constricting. Parker Jennings, as Hedda, lets loose only a few times, and only when no one is present to see her frustration. Conell Sahler as her devoted, dithering husband is terrific. Paola Ferrer as Aunt Julianna is crisply clueless of her baffling new niece.

In 2025, Hedda Gabler is more than theater. It’s a cautionary tale. As our society slides backwards, and intimations of A Handmaids Tale feel uncomfortably close, god forbid we return to the skewered perspectives of Victorian Europe that Ibsen so keenly dissects.