ART AND ABOUT: A marriage of theater and art

Editor’s note: This bi-weekly column on the arts community is written on a rotating basis by a member of the Coastline Pilot staff.

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The Laguna Playhouse and the Laguna Art Museum collaborated Saturday to celebrate “Art,” the play that opened that night.

It was seen by many as a marriage made in heaven, the brainchild of theater board member Laura Rohl, wife of Lou Rohl, president of the museum, which hosted a pre-opening reception.

“This is the first event of a collaborative effort ever, that I am aware of,” he said.

Laura Rohl said the event was so well received that reservation call lines were clogged with acceptances.

“The idea just popped into my head,” she said. “My life is the museum and the playhouse. Lou’s here. I’m there. We thought they would get along famously.

“I hope it’s the first of many such events.”

Museum Director Bolton Colburn and playhouse artistic director for 16 years, Andrew Barnicle, spoke at the reception.

“I got a shocking communication from Lou about a week ago with suggestions for what I might talk about,” Colburn said. “Jeez, he was working overtime.”

The suggestions were shocking because Colburn had not seen the play, first produced in 1995 in Paris and subsequently translated into 20 different languages and staged worldwide.

“But Andy sent me a script and I have come up with a document that I’m kind of proud of,” Colburn said.

Colburn concluded the painting by Antrios in “Art” plays a vital role, adding a fourth entity to the play’s three protagonists whose uninterrupted, one-and-a-half-hour conversation delves into the effect on their relationships incited by reaction to the costly, virtually all-white canvas newly purchased by one of them and dissed by another.

Indeed, the script got him thinking about how such a conversation might go about the museum’s current exhibition, “Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence.”

“I’m sure that the conversation would be 180 degrees different,” Colburn said. “In this post modern/post deconstructivist time, instead of [one character] arguing the merits of modernist reductive painting I think he might be arguing that cartooning and graphic design can be considered art.”

That is certainly the position taken by Dennis Power, president of the Laguna School of Art & Design, who attended the reception.

“Those are two majors for a bachelor’s degree in fine arts,” Power said. “They require the training, skill and understanding of color and composition that all successful artists must have.”

In his talk, Colburn echoed his interpretation of the script and asked his audience to think about the relevancy of art to people “” asking them to consider questions he often left unanswered, interspersed in his mini-lecture on the modernism movement.

Antrios’s painting may be silent in the play, but its presence speaks volumes, Colburn said.

But what is it communicating? What was the artist’s intention? Could the artist have foreseen the dialogue the three protagonists would have?

“No, probably not,” Colburn said. “However, as alluded to in this play, modernism is a kind of rarified conversation itself.”

A conversation that becomes more esoteric, more refined, until the need for an object is precluded, according to Colburn.

“One of the operative factors in a conversation in “” let’s just call the language modernism “” is to reduce things to their essence,” Colburn said.

The idea becomes more important than the physical representation of it. So what would you need to take part in the conversation and to understand it?

“Yes, you would need to know something about what is being talked about, the history of painting,” Colburn said. “I would go further and venture that the more current the art being created the more up to the moment you would need to be, to understand it. In the 1950s and 1960s, there might only have been 20 or 30 people that had enough understanding of what had just been said to know what the next statement meant.

“So, getting back to Rick Griffin, the author of the art surrounding you. Who do you think Rick is having a conversation with?

“Is it with other artists? Yes? No? Is it part of the modernist language? Yes? No? With your cultural background can you understand Rick’s dialogue?”

Colburn left his audience with one last unanswered question: “Does including more people in a conversation make what is being said less important?”

Barnicle said he worries when two people agree about art, that it should inspire discourse at the least “” even discord “” the more the better.

“Three people look at the blank white painting [in “Art”] and it generates all kinds of tension,” Barnicle said.

However, there was no dissension about the success of the collaboration between the performing and visual arts Saturday.

“I think it is nice to have all the arts working together,” Sandy Schwarzstein said. “I know Dennis Power is working really hard toward that goal.”

The opening night audience included college board member Mary Ferguson, Gary and Arts Commissioner Nancy Beverage, Jan and Festival of Arts board member Fred Sattler, Lisa and Athens Group Vice President John Mansour, Bob and Planning Commissioner Linda Dietrich, Visitor’s Bureau President Karen Philippsen, Cherry and former playhouse board member Vern Spitaleri, AIDS Services Foundation founder Al Roberts and Splash founder Ken Jillson, sculptor Joe Sovella and Nuray De Priest, Mary and Matt Lawson, Laguna Beach Taxpayers Association and Friends of the Library President Martha Lydick, and playhouse board member Joan Gladstone.

“It is lovely to see so many familiar faces,” Barnicle said.

The play is not for those offended by four letter words, but for others, it is a hoot.

For more about the play, see Tom Titus’s review, page B1.