Stage

Art’ humorously explores disagreements among friends

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Rift in the room: The men of Art argue over … something.
Courtesy
Jacob Coakley

Ever broken up because your significant other listened to Miley Cyrus or Led Zeppelin or whomever way too much? Ever gotten into a blood feud at work after someone stole what was clearly your coffee cup? Sometimes in life it’s the smallest, stupidest things that can cause the biggest rifts. In Art, by Yasmina Reza, opening at the Las Vegas Little Theatre September 4, the fault lines in a friendship are set off by the acquisition of an experimental piece of art: a field of white, with white diagonal lines on it. The absurdity of it all sets three friends at odds, and as their disagreement escalates, their friendship—and the artwork itself—is threatened with destruction.

“It really comes down to the fact that the artwork makes Mark feel that he’s losing his friend Serge, and Ivan’s caught in the middle,” director Mark Avis explains. Both friends get more and more vicious with one another, not hesitating to go for the jugular. “That’s one of the things that really hits home for me about the play,” Avis says, “that people in real life, just because they get hurt, do stupid things.”

But if this is the collapse of a friendship, it could be one of the funniest breakups you’ll ever see. As the friends battle each other, and Ivan battles to keep them together, their cutting barbs elicit laughs along with the destruction. Reza mines their past, the nature of art and their innate, well, Frenchness, for comedy. “It could be a very tragic story, but it’s very well-written to bring out the humor,” says Avis, who’s sure everyone can identify with the main point: “We’re all idiots sometimes. Let’s just relax and enjoy the friendships we have.”

Art September 4-20; Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.; $10-$15. Las Vegas Little Theatre, 702-362-7996.

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