Chaucer in Rome (review)

Chaucer In Rome. By John Guare. Lincoln Center Theatre at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, New York. 20 June 2001.

In John Guare's recent play, Chaucer in Rome, art is not so much dead as it is deadly. The artist, the subject, and the viewer are all in mortal danger, and even absolution from the Pope may not be enough to save them.

Guare has guided his audiences into explorations of art and death before, most notably in The House of Blue Leaves (1971) and Six Degrees of Separation (1990), two plays which assure Guare's place as one of America's eminent playwrights of the late twentieth century. Lincoln Center Theatre created highly acclaimed productions of the 1986 revival of Blue Leaves and the premiere of Six Degrees, both under the direction of Jerry Zaks. In 1999, New York's Signature Theatre Company performed an entire season of plays by Guare, and it seems the experience may have encouraged him to "retrospect" and reconsider his previous work. Chaucer in Rome is something of a follow-up and a return to Blue Leaves, and although neither Guare's writing nor Nicholas Martin's production at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theatre quite matches those heights, the play offers an interesting excursion into Guare's tragicomic world, playfully tickling and pointedly jabbing the audience with his characters' pretensions, failures, self-deceptions, and madness.

Either by chance or by design, Lincoln Center Theatre produced other works in the 2000-2001 season dealing with artists (Jon Robin Baitz's Ten Unknowns) and academics (Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love). The theme continues in Chaucer in Rome with the grandson of Artie Shaughnessy, the zoo-keeper-cum-songwriter-cum-wife-murderer of Blue Leaves. Pete (charmingly played by the preternaturally boyish Bruce Norris) is a student of Renaissance painting at the American Academy in Rome at the turn of the millennium. Unlike the thousands of pilgrims traveling to the Holy Sea in 2000 A.D., he and his friends are more interested in earthly success than in spiritual salvation. Together, they form a sort of trinity of the Modern Art World: Matt the painter (Jon Tenney), Sarah the curator (Carrie Preston), and Pete the scholar-critic. Matt, we discover at the beginning of the play, has just been cured of the cancer caused by the lead-based paints with which he works. Matt explains that he deliberately works with toxic elements, and his friends are horrified by the danger he is creating for himself and for his audience. They conclude that Matt must find a new medium. [Begin Page 154]

As the young characters debate the merits of artistic versus scholarly pursuits, Guare slips into lame satire, relying on familiar arguments for easy laughs. Sarah, for example, gives a ludicrously simple-minded attack on painting as a "phallocentric" art--the cylindrical tubes of paint, the brush splattering its oils, raping the canvas, etc. It is a hollow parody of feminist criticism, and the audience is meant to laugh at the absurdity, but the laugh is undermined by the author's creeping condescension.

The play shifts into higher dramatic gear with the arrival of Pete's parents in Rome. Dick Latessa and Polly Holliday, both of them with shocking white hair and thick "Noo Yawk" accents, play these two vibrant comic characters endearingly and sincerely. They are helped by some of the play's best writing, since Guare shows greater insight and affection for the failures of his middle-aged characters than for the pretensions of the young. Ron and Dolo have come to the Eternal City to find their son, as well as to be forgiven for their sins--real, potential, and imagined. Here the play takes its most contrived turn, and the success of the rest of the play depends on how willingly an audience member will follow Guare down this path. The three Academy fellows decide that Matt's new medium will be video, and he will create powerful art by...