It is the last day of The Broken Silence group exhibit in a nameless, placeless museum and chaos is erupting all over the art world. Just the day before Botticelli’s the Birth of Venus was viciously attacked–the canvas shot 18 times by a hooded gunman who is yet to be identified or captured. The group exhibit room seems relatively peaceful, a quiet retreat from the chaos of the outside world full of strange art, suspended in the surreal calm much like the calm before a storm. On the round, blown stage of the Ruth Caplin Theatre, pedestals displaying bizarre art pieces made of found objects like feathers, bones, flowers, and animal pelts are set up before the audience, while an odd mobile of clothes containing flattened bodies are strung up to dry on a clothesline above a white platform which holds a coiled green hose and whicker basket containing roundhead clothespins. The works at the far end of the gallery are all pure and perfectly white–a sphere, a column, a large, flat floor-to-ceiling rectangle, and a square half on the floor, half on the wall, melting in a surrealist manner that would call to mind Salvador Dali. These three collections may make up the exhibit, but what’s truly on display for the duration of the show are the wide array of eccentric characters that waltz, leap, tip-toe, stomp, laugh, and sob on and off the stage.
Museum, written by Tina Howe and first performed in 1976, is certainly not your typical play. With a running time short enough to skip an intermission and a cast consisting of over thirty players, there is never a dull moment. The cast consists of a menagerie of vibrant and colorful characters, depicting all the types you may–or may not–expect to see in a notable museum gallery. There’s the French couple, the gay couple, the photographers and the art students battling the guard for permission to document the art, the fashionable Southern belles, the eccentric friends of the eccentric artist, the laughing ladies who make light and mock, the avant-garde, nouveau riche power couple, and an incredibly passionate–almost erotically so–museum curator, among many equally entertaining others. Over the course of the play the characters cycle in and out, one at a time or in groups of two or three. The Caplin Theatre, like the Globe Theatre in London, offers the unique viewing experience of a thrust stage–a stage that extends into and is surrounded on three sides by the audience. On a thrust stage actors will sometimes turn their backs to the audience, which works particularly well with Museum’s often crowded stage; even though there might be many actors on stage at once all conversing in smaller groups, the audience’s attention is diffused to this or those characters, depending on where the audience member is sitting and on which characters are staged to draw the audience’s attention. As director Doug Grissom aptly put it in a talkback session after Thursday night’s performance, “Wherever you sit you see a different play.”
Doug Grissom, a Drama professor here at the University of Virginia, helped shed light on the somewhat convoluted and at times seemingly random nature of the show. When asked what the overall message of the play was, Doug smiled. “What was the message of the play? I have no idea. It’s how people react to art and the variety of ways people can react to art.” Despite the play’s being set in a gallery, it is more about the people and the ways in which they respond to the art pieces then the objects themselves. Among the reactions captured in the play were mocking attitudes of the frivolous and seemingly arbitrary nature of modern art, the snobbishness of the know-it-all art fanatic, and the sheer awe and pleasure that can come from witnessing an artwork that is truly moving, or truly beautiful. People do react differently to art, especially new art by new artists, still yet to be acknowledged by the critics and the art-history books. After all, what is “good taste” any way? While one critic claims that the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock is genius, another posits that his work is trash. The art world is a subjective place tailored by personal taste, and by nature opens up discourse for varying interpretations and emotional responses. That’s part of the beauty of art, though, isn’t it? What one person finds beautiful is disturbing to another; what one woman finds tactless is the epitome of class and elegance to her friend. As Doug Grissom perfectly stated, “Art is not a mathematical equation. Everyone is going to get something different out of it.”