“When Yasmina Reza’s ‘Art’ burst onto the scene in 1994 – first in Paris, then London, then New York, then across international stages in a matter of months – it was beloved by audiences and critics. The play was simultaneously about masculinity and ‘Art’ zeitgeists, and it rang like a bellwether for a ‘Baby Boomer’ generation that was stepping into its own.

As a teenager at that time, I knew ‘Art’ as a play that fussy straight white men wanted to do all the time in drama class. Those guys wanted to ‘roleplay’ with power all. the. time. I really didn’t think the play was for me.

I knew, like, philosophically, that the play was about the subject of ‘art’ and who gets to decide what is good art and what is bad art – clocking a weird sort of allergy that society (maybe Capitalism) has to a ‘middle’. And I could tell that the play calls out just how weird it is when a creative product suddenly becomes really, really expensive and so it must be ‘good art’ because the money requires it to remain so. Those were the ideas that I saw in the play. But again, I’d think: why do those guys have to fight about it so much? What’s it all really worth?

Then I got older. Crossing the ‘40’ yard line helped me see the play a little differently. I see how the ‘middle’ of life is potential – and maybe even a little dangerous. The play begins with a guy who buys a white painting with three white lines for $200,000 and wants to show it to his friends. He’s in the middle of life: the middle of his career, the middle of his divorce, the middle of parenting his two kids who are in the middle of how they feel about him. In this mid-life moment, he doesn’t buy a red corvette… he buys a $200,000 painting. How will his closest friends – who are in the dangerous middle of their own lives – respond to his purchase? Can we buy a new start? Can we buy a blank canvas?

And next to that, what I see now in the play is a sort of cost of ‘best behavior’ in masculine spaces. These men are really ‘educated’ – society groomed them. These men listened to their mentors, and they studied hard – taking the roads most travelled by the men before them. They went to school, got a job, got a career, got a family, got a big bleeping television (that’s a Gen X ‘Trainspotting’ quote for you). The cost of these power-preserving ‘best behaviors’ is a cultivated aggression stuffed so far down inside of them that something must give. That white painting is the first crack for the wall to come tumbling down.

In ‘Art’, Yasmina bears these cracks in the wall/lines in the canvas through a mad hilarity. A sort of: ‘if you didn’t laugh, the alternative would be much worse’. She stretches her comedy, kneads it and rolls it out to a place of absurdity, and in 2025 that feels about right. Power in masculine spaces, playing charades with ‘best behavior’, and growing more aggressive by the week. All that fighting for power we see around us must be about something more vulnerable than power… that’s interesting to me.

You’ll hear references to ‘Euros’, to the ‘Pompidou’ – French playwright Yasmina Reza very much situated her play in Paris – and there’s not a textual reference to email or cell phones because it was written in 1994. But working on this play these past months, I think that her take on masculinity reaches across Paris to Berkeley, and her take reaches across the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation to ‘Gen X’.

My child is Gen Alpha (what?!) The next generation of ‘masculinity’ is well on its way in our modern society. Who are their mentors?”

– Director Emilie Whelan