There\u2019s a scene in “The Color of Light,” La Jolla-based Vantage Theatre\u2019s current entry at Tenth Avenue Arts Center, wherein French artist and central character Henri Matisse recalls Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir\u2019s fortitude in the face of the untold.\u00a0
\nTo hear Hank spin it, Renoir\u2019s arthritis was so painful that he had to fasten his brush to his hand en route to a work\u2019s completion, yet there sat the artist all the while, insisting that the discomfort was a small price to pay for a job well done. Matisse tells the story with no particular gravitas as if to draw a comparison between Renoir\u2019s situation and his own. Matisse was not a well man as World War II advanced, but he continued his work unabated amid the prospect of its unparalleled beauty.\u00a0
\nLittle did he suspect that he was about to orchestrate the most selflessly wondrous act of his career, and with this very good world-premiere true story mounted in association with Talent to aMuse Theatre Company, we track his closely held thoughts on religion, art and the unlikely providence that wrought the power of love as its own reward.\u00a0
\nThe bombs of war peppered the outskirts of Nice like so many spider hawks in 1942, the year Matisse underwent intestinal cancer surgery and subsequently took to a wheelchair. Now 73, he would hire 21-year-old nursing student Monique Bourgeois as his “young and pretty” caregiver, and amid Monique\u2019s aspirations to the Dominican sisterhood, the two would engage in spirited debate about art and religion. \u00a0\u00a0
\nMatisse, an avowed atheist, insisted that his self-described “Church of Art” is the morally superior, while the soon-to-be Sister Jacques-Marie would devote her life to the glory of God versus His Name alone. Monique was fast becoming a granddaughter figure amid a gentility and grace only a granddad could love. With her departure, the artist is thunderstruck.
\nFive years later, the two meet in Venice, just northwest of Nice and the locale of Jacques-Marie\u2019s convent, whose chapel bore a relentlessly leaky roof. She hopes to get the old man to design a stained-glass window as a repair fundraiser\u2014but he would go her many times better, creating a new chapel in her name and that of the Dominican order.\u00a0
\nThe Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence today stands on a street named for Matisse. The artist died in 1954, Jacques-Marie in 2005.
\nThe cool thing about this story is its utter lack of pretense between the principals. New York writer Jesse Kornbluth and La Jolla director Robert Salerno have absolutely no axes to grind amid the characters\u2019 debates, smartly shifting the onus onto a series of secondary figures. Matisse and Jacques-Marie are no less adamant in their points of view, but they ultimately agree to disagree, thereby setting the tone for one of the greatest platonic love stories contemporary art has come to know.\u00a0
\nBut for a play about the color of light, the piece does come up short on the settings. While the rear projections of warfare and of Matisse\u2019s works are effective, they\u2019re also left adrift amid the lack of descriptors that may have inspired the artist and, therefore, the debates. Even in wartime, Nice and Venice were lovely cities, but Kornbluth neglects to give them their due as such, and some of the particulars are thus lost in the translation.
\nPlease understand that this takes nothing away from the turn by O. P. Hadlock, who bears a striking resemblance to Hank and who retains much of his intense joviality in the face of illness. Cecily Keppel provides an interesting contrast between Monique\u2019s pre-and post-convent lives, but even as she\u2019s been well-coached, she has a tendency to anticipate her characters\u2019 reactions.\u00a0
\nJames Steinberg\u2019s swaggery Picasso, Terence Burke\u2019s quisling Dominion monk Rayssiguier, Bobbie Helland\u2019s stern secretary Lydia and Jody Catlin\u2019s stick-up-her-butt Mother Superior are disparately well-written and performed.
\nLush strains from Frederic Chopin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart color Hadlock\u2019s rustic, mono-frame set, ideal amid Salerno\u2019s stage pictures. Salerno, associate designer Michael Barahura and costumer Sheeila Rosen complete the tech crew, which arguably performed yeoman service in ironing out the potential kinks. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n“Conflict” is a playwright\u2019s much sought-after commodity, and as such, it\u2019s a loaded word. Even so, it can come in many forms, just like the characters that steward it. Here, Kornbluth and Salerno take it for what it is\u2014the foundation for a unique and loving relationship between church and state and the fuel for a slice of history that might have otherwise been left unearthed. Very, very nice.
\n“The Color of Light” runs through Feb. 3 at Tenth Avenue Arts Center, located at 930 Tenth Avenue downtown. For more information, call\u00a0619-940-6813,\u00a0or visit vantagetickets.com.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s a scene in “The Color of Light,” La Jolla-based Vantage Theatre\u2019s current entry at Tenth Avenue Arts Center, wherein French artist and central character Henri Matisse recalls Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir\u2019s fortitude in the face of the untold.\u00a0 To hear Hank spin it, Renoir\u2019s arthritis was so painful that he had to fasten his brush […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":272710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11559","_seopress_titles_title":"User-friendliness is key in Vantage\u2019s fine \u2018Color of Light\u2019","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11559,11551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beach-bay-press","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}