The intersection where Art and Commerce meet has always been a rough neighborhood. Nowadays it seems worse than ever.
It’s garishly lit and rents are sky high. If you’re an artist, the growls and gavels of auctioneers and the white noise of social media makes it hard to focus on your work. There’s a lot of strangers hanging around pretending they knew you when. People who bought into the neighborhood when it was cheap are finding out the foundations are sinking.
Add an artist’s race, gender and sexual preference to this corrosive mix of money and ambition and you could cause an explosion that would wreck the place.
Thankfully, local actor, educator and Barrymore-winning playwright James ljames has done some urban renewal in the arts community by writing a funny and provocative comedy (based on a true story) that illuminates our current state of artistic, racial and gender politics. “White,” in its world premiere at Theatre Horizon in Norristown does this by mixing a helping of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with a dash of reality TV, floodlit by a flash grenade of Diana Ross’ diva power and Beyonce’s uber-feminism.
If this sounds too garish to be coherent, consider. It’s relatively recently that painting and related arts became big business. Not content with buying art as an interior design enhancement and/or object of envy, The New York Times reports that many of the world’s greatest works of art, bought by billionaires and corporations are transformed into economic poker chips and stored in “climate controlled bunkers” in tax-free “ports” such as Geneva.
Thus when we meet Gus, a gay artist who prefers expressing his personal vision in geometric shades of white, it’s understandable that he believes his own ticket into art’s lucrative inner circle is getting his pale work included in a big new show at the local art museum. But his friend Jane the curator seeks art that will challenge visitors and raise her professional profile, and Gus doesn’t make the cut.
This doesn’t stop him. Empowered by a mystical vision in which diva Diana Ross appears in a flash of glitter and tells him to believe in his artistic vision, he recruits an actress named Vanessa to promote his work as hers, as the newest artistic discovery “Balkonae’ Townsend.” Vanessa finds she likes being Balkonae’ and soon creates her own artistic style “Bad Bitch Expressionism” that horrifies Gus but makes her the hit of the show.
This surreal moment is where reality intrudes, for ljames based this improbable match on Joe Scanlon, an actual white artist who created a black female artist named “Donelle Woolford” and collaborated with two black female artists to portray her in various venues. The playwright presents Gus’ choice as really no choice at all, but asks some key questions. Must artists be honest as well as creative? Or is honesty without talent enough? Do race and sexual preference help define artistic vision? Doesn’t everyone want to be successful doing what they love to do? Does anyone want to create in obscurity?
Well, a great number of artists, black and white, did (and do) just that. Sometimes they live long enough to be “rediscovered’ in a retrospective, but often not. The next reality check is the shocking lack of black artists in major art exhibits. As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1968 for an exhibition of black artist Romare Bearden it’s past time we addressed “that imbalance in American society which leads to a distorted perception of social reality, to a stubborn blindness to the creative possibilities of cultural diversity, to the prevalence of negative myths, racial stereotypes and dangerous illusions about art, humanity and society.”
By addressing this imbalance with broad satire and puncturing some old-fashioned stereotypes, the playwright makes the audience rethink how art is made and (particularly) presented (and marketed). Though the ending is ambiguous, the search for definition is not. Vanessa/Balkonae has her own creative impulse awakened. But how she defines, categorizes and values it is a journey we don’t get to see.
Director Malika Oyetimein makes the most of this artistic mashup and clearly relishes a story of a black woman transformed by the profitable and provocative electricity of the modern art world. She gives the cast considerable free rein to create their own modalities of expression (as curators would say), and Jaylene Clark Owens as Vanessa and Jessica Bedford as Jane are able to paint their comic personas with broad brushes (so to speak). Owens is a powerhouse portraying three different characters and Bedford’s turn as the vogue-obsessed curator is a treat. Jamison Foreman, hilarious this season in Act II Theater’s production of “Tomfoolery” is just as appealing here as the desperately scheming, happily neurotic Gus.
