Playwright: Jon Robin Baitz. At: Will Act For Food at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport. Tickets: 800-982-2787 ( fee ) or Athenaeum box office. Runs through: May 29
It's 1949. Twentysomething painter Malcolm Raphelson is the future of American Art until his realistic style is swept away by surging abstract impressionism, and he's relegated to obscurity. It's 1992. Raphelson is living in Mexico when a major international art dealer offers him a New York show that will re-establish his reputation and wreak vengeance on the generation of artists he's outlived. The dealer throws thousands of dollars at Raphelsonliterallyand provides an artist's assistant to help prepare his newest work for exhibition. At that moment a new, much-younger woman enters the delicately-emerging troika of artist, dealer and assistant.
That's the gist of Ten Unknowns, a not-very-good play by Jon Robin Baitz, the author of several much-better plays and creator of TV's Brothers and Sisters. It's a not-very-good play because the basic set-up is forced and improbable, especially the old artist's quick uptake of Julia, a marine biologist conducting an ecological study of Mexican frogs. Then, the four characters are mouthpieces for Baitz's declamations on art, commercialism, the nature of the artist and The Struggle To Create. Not one of the characters comes off as a real person, partly because of the script and partly because of the uninspired paint-by-the-numbers performances of the cast. There's not much one can do with the material save bluster, and there's plenty of that. It's a not-very-good play because Malcolm Raphelson is an unlikable, egocentric blowhard, reminiscent of the similarly initialed real-life painter Mark Rothkowho may have been Baitz's mental model for Raphelson. As Julia says to Malcolmwhom she's known less than a month"You have no skill at being kind or being generous. The signal-to-noise ratio is unbearable."
The talky first act leads to an Act II conclusion in which Raphelson predictably rejects that old devil, commercial success. The shocker is supposed to be that Raphelson and the assistant, Judd, have destroyed all of Raphelson's recent paintings because Judd has executed most of the work under the direction of physically failing Raphelson. But we are told this in a late-in-the-play argument; we never see it happening. For all its talk, Ten Unknowns never actually explores the making of art.
Also, with due respect to limited off-Loop budgets, the physical production is lackluster, a couple of flats thrown up without any suggestion of the Mexican garden setting of the dialogue, and without a light source for painting. Still, Andrew Jordan's "Raphelson" landscapes and portraits are suitably convincing.
Will Act For Food ( WAFF ) is a worthy troupe that collects food for community organizations ( Lakeview Pantry this show ) ; you earn a ticket discount for donated canned goods. WAFF has done some fine work previously, but Ten Unknowns is not a show to frame and hang over the mantle.