The original idea was groovy when announced; it still feels groovy now. Take a young theatre company with a proven track record, give them residence at City Park, and then unleash them across the public space to create performance as they see fit. That is exactly what The New Orleans Museum of Art has done with The NOLA Project

and when the results succeed, as they did in smashing style with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it can make you believe this whole theatre thing might actually work in New Orleans. No sooner had they finished their eight-performance triumph of The Bard in The Besthoff Sculpture Garden than they leapt into their next project: Yasmina Reza’s award-winning ART. Another groovy idea. After all, the story of lifelong friends Marc, Yvan and Serge arguing over the latter’s exorbitant purchase of an all-white canvas seems tailor made for the theatre inside the museum.

And it just keeps getting groovier. Instead of limiting the fun, The NOLA Project decided to double down on the casting by using six actors instead of three. AJ Allegra, Richard Alexander Pomes, Michael Aaron Santos, Jason Kirkpatrick, James Bartelle, and Alex Wallace all get the opportunity to play a role and rotate combinations throughout the course of the run. This guarantees that, while the actors do not change characters, an audience never witnesses the same show that any other audience has or will see. Directed by company member Kate Kuen, the whole undertaking seems conceptualized with the idea to not only maximize publicity but also amplify the cool quotient for the warmest month of the year.
 

And I fear that might be the whole problem. The idea is groovier than the reality. Under Kuen’s controlling hand, this ART is all style and no substance. It feels more like a parlor trick than an actual attempt at doing the play. The logistic necessity of creating a cookie-cutter blocking pattern for six actors takes precedent over organic reality.  Furthermore, it is simply the wrong show for the company. To this critic, ART has always felt like it could easily degenerate into an episode of Frasier lacking John Mahoney’s authority or heart. Therefore, in order to make it work, it requires pitch perfect casting and an effortless familiarity between the actors. If those are two elements are in place, the illusion of substance and depth can be created in the slight text.
 

However, despite possessing the requisite skill, none of the actors are age appropriate for their roles. They are simply too young. Now, before any of you start roiling up to explain to me the concept of suspending my disbelief or explicate that acting is an opportunity for transformation, I would like to point out two things. First, the suspension of disbelief requires that the responsible artists secure strong lines to maintain that suspension. In other words, I can only make believe if an effort is made to make believe with me. That brings me to my second point. In order for acting to be transformative, the actor has to transform. But in the production I saw last Sunday, no effort was made to become something other than a heightened version of the self; therefore, I was unable to suspend my disbelief.  
 

ART is the story of three grown men, in the late summer of their lives, behaving like pretentious graduate students over a painting. The comedy springs from the fact that they should know better and still behave badly. But with the exception of possibly Kirkpatrick, the six actors are not even in the orbit of their character’s ages. And in the version I witnessed, little attempt was made to rectify that problem through either makeup or characterization. Excepting Kirkpatrick, none of the performers possessed the sense of gravity that creeps into a body after forty. We do not perceive lives lived in their physical presences. Because of this, dialogue about their fifteen-year friendship is puzzling at best and jarring at worse. Nothing in the text suggests they were childhood friends, so even that potential justification is denied them. It has the further consequence of muting the silliness of the stakes, because, after all, the quality of art is exactly what self-important men in their late twenties argue about. They have not lived long enough to understand such conflict is not worth the price of a friendship. We expect them to argue, and then, we expect them to reconcile. It is what twentysomethings do.
 

To make matters worse, Kuen over directs it. I suspect she did this to create a one-size-fits-all frame so as to give consistency to essentially eight different casts. But that strategy works against the very nature of the show. As I said, ART depends on a certain ease and moment-to-moment reaction. This would give it the feel of a voyeuristic slice-of-life. The viewer should then have the sense of being a Peeping Tom for a tempest in a teapot: one that threatens to scald a valued friendship. But organic familiarity evaporates under a deterministic directorial hand and a slick reliance on punch line precision. Few in town can execute a joke like AJ Allegra, but he is capable of much more. The production has all the spontaneity of a mannerist painting.
 

To belabor the artistic metaphor, this ART feels like Pointillism when it should have had the more effortless brush of Impressionism. The production I saw felt very unfair to the performers, trapping them in blocking patterns and bits with telegraphed buttons. An early sequence in Yvan’s upended apartment felt more focused on the business of searching through trash and furniture than on discovering the motive behind his movement. Kuen seemed more intent on featuring her own work than that of her actors. In a three-man character driven piece, it is an act of obstinate hubris. On more than one occasion, the actors appeared more interested in executing the business at hand than on reacting to their surroundings.
 

Kuen should have left her actors more room to play and focused on the crucial details that fall under her purview. A product of the previous century, ART is incredibly dated, but much like this year’s Closer, no attempt is made to dramaturgically place it in its time of creation. This is not to say that Shauna Leone’s costumes are not tasteful or that Kyle June Williams’ furniture and props are not exquisite in their choice. I particularly liked the decanters on the bar. ART looks first-rate, but it does not look of the era in which the play takes place. Kuen’s production is happening in the now, and that does no favors to the text. The story of three pampered middle-aged men in crisis was hardly bearable in The Roaring 90s; in an age of economic collapse and simmering class tensions, it is insufferably clueless. Serge’s expenditure seems reckless in the current context, and this skewers the balance of the argument.
 

More damagingly, and as incredible as this might seem, she and artwork wrangler Sarah Zoghbi manage to bollix the white canvas. The painting looks nothing like the product of controlled minimalism that the three men are describing throughout. We need not see exactly what Serge is articulating when he looks at his cherished object, but it must not contradict those words. The argument in ART is concerning a matter of taste; it is not over a failure of execution. The canvas is described as a clean, linear, textured work that may or may not be in possession of gradations of the base color. However, as presented, it shines with swirls, is of a consistent color, and has a runny quality that would send the most intrepid amateur house painter back to Home Depot in search of counter help. The work suffers a lot of criticism throughout the text, but the word “sloppy” is never applied. I could not take my eyes off it, desperately searching for details ascribed to it. If Kuen was hell bent on showcasing her skills at moving people through space, it might have behooved her to make sure nothing distracted from that agenda.
 

But here is my punch line: I still think you should go. Despite being almost a complete misfire, ART still manages to entertain. At least in the version I saw, all three performers were engaging and knew how to tell a story. Despite my misgivings with her methodology, Kuen does know how to geographically move actors through space and keeps the world moving at a brisk pace. Moreover, her commitment to the show’s laughs means you will chuckle on more than occasion. Right down to the classic music covers of Queen that precede the show, it is all designed to ensure a good time. And ultimately, to return where we began, it really is a groovy experience. About half-way through, and in the midst of my misgivings, I became hyper aware I was sitting in an air-conditioned museum on a hot summer night watching young people attempting to create quality theatre backed up by a sense of event. Imagine what these artists can accomplish with the right script.
I hear they are doing Romeo and Juliet next.