Orange County Premiere!
Inventing Van Gogh
by Steven Dietz
directed by Oanh Nguyen
- 02/01/07 ARTICLE: Press-Enterprise
- 02/08/07 REVIEW: Back Stage West
- 02/09/07 REVIEW: OC Register
- 02/15/07 REVIEW: Fullerton Observer
- 02/22/07 REVIEW: OC Weekly
- More Press on The Chance
THEATER ARTICLE
Nature of van Gogh's Talents
by Pat O'Brien, Press-Enterprise
February 1, 2007
When Oanh Nguyen, artistic director of the Chance Theater, first read "Inventing Van Gogh" by Steven Dietz, he was captivated.
"I found it to be absolutely magical and rich and theatrical," he said. "It's why people come to theater."
He is directing the Orange County premiere of the play, a story about artists in two time periods that shift and bend between the 1890s and today.
"The whole piece is about discovering where creativity comes from," Nguyen said. Is it God-given or man-made and how would we know?
But it's also a compelling murder mystery. The central character, Patrick, may have killed his mentor.
"Watching this play, you should be at the edge of your seat," Nguyen said.
Patrick's mentor, professor Miller, has spent his life obsessed with finding a lost masterpiece -- the last self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh before he committed suicide. But then Miller dies near the spot where Van Gogh died.
"Did he kill himself or did Patrick do it for him? We meet Patrick after the death. He is in hiding and artistically blocked," Nguyen said.
Yes, there is humor in this play, as well.
To create the two worlds and a sometimes hallucinatory feel, the theater had to stretch its creativity.
"We are running three projectors, which is a lot for a small theater like ours," Nguyen said. Two laptops run the projectors, and additional lights and sound are needed. "We had to update the whole theater to get the production to work the way we wanted."
"Inventing Van Gogh" runs Sunday through March 11. There will be a preview performance Saturday. The play alternates with the musical comedy "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change." $25; $22 seniors/students. The Chance Theater, 5552 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills. 714-777-3033. Tickets: 1-800-838-3006. www.chancetheater.com
[top]
THEATER REVIEW
Inventing Van Gogh
by Melinda Schupmann, Back Stage West
February 8, 2007
The scene is an artist's studio. A young man is tormented, staring at a blank canvas scarred by a diagonal slash. His solitude is interrupted by a person, calling himself an authenticator, offering a proposal that the artist make a copy of a so-called missing self-portrait of Van Gogh, which could be sold for a fortune. Thus a scene is set that explores the obsessions of Van Gogh and this young man, Patrick Stone (Casey Long).
Steven Dietz's cerebral exploration of art and artistry is a challenging theatrical piece. In addition to Stone, he adds Van Gogh (David J. Dalton) and Van Gogh's onetime friend Gauguin (Jonathon Lamer) and physician Dr. Paul Gachet (Sean Hannaway). Lamer and Hannaway also fill in for figures in Stone's life, and Aubrey Saverino plays two women whose lives are affected by their relationships with these conflicted men.
Set designer Masako Tobaru's stark and ominous dark panels work well, creating an austere background and a textured backdrop for projected images of Van Gogh's works. Jeff Brewer's atmospheric lighting complements the changing moods of the story. Oanh Nguyen's stylized direction defines the intermingling stories of the modern artist and the world of Van Gogh. As characters morph from present to past, they exit and enter the stage as observers and participants very effectively.
Dalton delivers a multifaceted Van Gogh in optimistic and anguished times. Saverino is also fine as the sympathetic women. Lamer and Hannaway antagonize, conciliate, or provoke as required, and Long projects an effective victim of his own devils.
A false note is struck by waxing and waning French accents as the passion heats up. Dietz's dialogue has moments when it takes itself too seriously: "an artist's studio is a place of ghosts." Nonetheless, he dishes up a fascinating view of art history and the nature of genius. It is an ambitious production with meaty food for thought.
Presented by and at the Chance Theater, 5552 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim. Sat. 4 p.m., Sun. 6 p.m. Feb. 4-Mar. 11. (714) 777-3033. www.chancetheater.com.
[top]
THEATER REVIEW
'Inventing Van Gogh' reflects on the nature of art
Review: The Chance Theater production looks at a famed artist through a contemporary lens.
by Eric Marchese, OC Register
February 9, 2007
If a contemporary artist could talk to Vincent van Gogh, what would he say - especially if he held the Dutch painter and his work in low regard?
That's the premise of "Inventing Van Gogh," the 2001 Steven Dietz drama billed by the play's publisher as "hallucinatory." Considering its technique of intersecting past and present, it could hardly be anything but.
The play's Orange County (and Los Angeles-area) premiere at the Chance Theater indeed weaves a hazy, delusional aura. Scenes from the life of Patrick Stone (Casey Long), a bitter artist in hiding from the world, overlap with the those of van Gogh (David J. Dalton), himself something of a recluse.
Dietz cannily draws other parallels: Patrick is a student and follower of Dr. Miller (Sean Hannaway), a scholar devoted to the works of van Gogh - and becomes romantically involved with Miller's daughter Hallie (Aubrey Saverino); Dr. Gachet (Hannaway) is an older friend of van Gogh's whose daughter, Marguerite (Saverino), works as a model for the artist, pining for his affections.
In Dietz's text and Oanh Nguyen's staging, shifts in time and space occur in a heartbeat.
Where "Inventing Van Gogh" succeeds, though, is in framing the 19th-century painter through the lens of today's art world.
Patrick is secretly commissioned by Rene Bouchard (Jonathon Lamer) to paint a forgery of van Gogh's final, and heretofore missing, self-portrait. That Bouchard is an art authenticator whose job is to "weed out forgeries" is just one of several ironies arising from Dietz's script.
What's also apparent, from both the text and what Nguyen and company put forth, is the self-sacrifice and, often, torment that great artists undergo in trying to realize their visions of the world onto a square of canvas. The tortured van Gogh's added struggles with grand mal seizures are well-documented, only gradually coming into focus here.
Turned off by the off-the-charts hype for all things van Gogh, Patrick has only contempt for van Gogh and his work - until the artist begins to communicate with him from across time and space. Their conversations - if you can refer to them as such - are elliptical, with Patrick doubting his own sanity. In head-to-head dialogue, Patrick attacks the slashing hastiness of van Gogh's working methods, equating it with madness; a fervent van Gogh defends the mental state which fostered his work as "terrible lucidity."
In other dialectical exchanges, Patrick brags to Dr. Miller that he can forge any van Gogh painting; van Gogh and friend and fellow artist Paul Gaugin (Lamer) debate the nature of art and the artist's role in society.
Dietz's text underscores several eerie life-and-death connections between his characters. Exactly a year before his own birth, van Gogh's older brother, also named Vincent, was stillborn - a fact that haunted the artist by the sense of himself as his sibling's ghost. Dr. Miller committed suicide on the same date as van Gogh's death by his own hand.
Emphasizing the play's themes, Nguyen stages the contemporary action toward the center of Masako Tobaru's diamond-shaped dais, while the 19th-century scenes unfold around the edges.
With his grungy duds and three-day stubble, Long's scruffy Patrick is reserved and tightly wound, dismissing van Gogh's entire canon as crudely juvenile. Dietz hints, however, and Long realizes, that Patrick is just waiting to catch some of van Gogh's fire.
His voice carrying a slightly Dutch tinge, Dalton's van Gogh is a study in mercurial emotions, by turns stern, anxious, buoyant, angry, talkative, tortured. In his compact frame, Dalton also captures the man's physical frailty.
Saverino's earthy young Hallie is impish and forward, exasperated with her father, desperate for Patrick's attention, jaded by the art world's values. The actress' Marguerite is a muted, Victorian-era mirror-image of Hallie, longing for van Gogh to see her as a woman, not just as a model.
Bouchard's cynicism is wholly modern, while Gaugin's revolves around the idea that an artist's life is self-centered, his works created only for his own gratification. The tall Jonathan Lamer distinguishes the two by making Bouchard smug and suavely oily, Gaugin commanding and self-possessed.
Dietz imbues Miller with sarcasm and a sense of irony - post-modern, of course - and Hannaway brings a breezy authority, and zeal for all things van Gogh, to the scholar, and a cheeky quality to Dr. Gachet.
Tobaru's scene design employs a series of screens onto which images of van Gogh's paintings are projected. Jeff Brewer's lighting and Rachel Stivers' costumes emphasize the yellows that dominated van Gogh's final works. Glenda Morgan Brown's dialect coaching completes the production's authenticity - a neatly apt concept when one considers the play's subject.
[top]
THEATER REVIEW
'Inventing Van Gogh' at The Chance
by Joyce & Elliott Rosenthal, Fullerton Observer
February 15, 2007
This Orange County premiere of Steven
Dietz's play examines the nature of art and
the often compulsive and obsessive behavior
of the artists who create it and who sometimes
cross the fine line which exists
between genius and madness.
Patrick Stone, a young artist hiding from the world, is asked by Rene Bouchard to forge what is said to be the last of Van Gogh's self-portraits. It disappeared after Van Gogh's death - or - perhaps it never existed at all. Bouchard is an "authenticator," someone who is an expert in detecting forgeries from real paintings and he will declare the painting done by Patrick to be a real Van Gogh, enabling it to be sold for millions of dollars.
Patrick is troubled by the death of his art teacher and mentor, Dr. Jonas Miller, who died of a gunshot wound under mysterious circumstances in France. Was it suicide, accident, murder? Was he alone or was someone with him? Dr. Miller was obsessed with Van Gogh and was in France looking for the lost portrait when he died. Patrick had a relationship with Hallie Miller which ended with the death of her father; she is back now and seems interested in taking up where they left off.
Vincent Van Gogh, his brother, his doctor, his doctor's daughter and fellow artist Paul Gauguin appear much to Patrick's bewilderment. As they talk among themselves we learn about Van Gogh's troubled life and the part each one played in it. Eventually, Patrick and Vincent speak to each other about the nature, the joy and burden of producing their painting. Is Patrick hallucinating? Has he, like Van Gogh crossed over the line from genius to madness?
Patrick and Van Gogh are played respectively by Casey Long and David J. Dalton who actually bears some resemblance to Van Gogh; both actors are impressive in their roles.
The rest of the cast each play two characters, one from Patrick's and the other from Van Gogh's world and they move constantly between them. It may sound confusing but Sean Hannaway, Aubrey Saverino and Jonathon Lamer move easily and cleanly between their roles differentiating them by clothing, accent and manner of speaking.
Director Oanh Nguyen has choreographed this play well, leading you to think not only about the nature of art, of genius and madness but he even makes it seem plausible that we can be receptive to people from other times and places.
The set by Masako Tobaru is a simple, unadorned raised platform which accommodates the constant coming and going of the various characters. It is surrounded by dark walls which come alive during the play with Van Gogh's paintings. It is very effective thanks to Jeff Brewer, the Lighting Designer.
Still have unanswered questions? Go see the play and discover your own answers. Inventing Van Gogh will be at Chance Theater through March 11th
[top]
THEATER REVIEW
Successful Obsessive Compulsive
Inventing Van Gogh and those in his shadow
by Nardine A. Saad, OC Weekly
February 22, 2007
Bust out Aristotle's Poetics for this one. Steven Dietz's Inventing Van Gogh is the kind of moral tragedy the Great Philosopher would love to dissect, one that makes you question the value of your craft-and the value others place on it-about every three minutes.
Although the play unfolds entirely in the studio of a modern-day artist named Patrick Stone, it manages to transcend both time and space through Stone's hallucinatory interactions with Vincent Van Gogh. The plot revolves around Stone's inability to paint since the mysterious death of his mentor and former teacher, Dr. Jonas Miller, a man who had been obsessed with Van Gogh's lifetime pursuit of the perfect self-portrait. Stone has always considered Van Gogh undeserving of his reputation as a master, but because of his "artist's block"-and his role in Miller's death-is coerced by a slimy art authenticator into copying Van Gogh's final self-portrait, a work whose mere existence is uncertain.
Stone gets a disheveled portrayal by Casey Long, which adds to the desperate sense of an existence haunted by forces from this world and beyond.
Van Gogh, played by a seasoned David J. Dalton, appears and reappears via hallucinations-Stone's, Dr. Miller's and even his own. By the end of the play he has turned every notion of his psychosis on its-er, his-severed ear. Dalton renders Van Gogh as a lovable neurotic instead of a brooding lunatic, filling the stage with a larger-than-life performance.
John Lamer plays the dual roles of Van Gogh's outspoken colleague, Paul Gaugin, and the creepy art authenticator Rene Bouchard, and he really shines in the latter, bringing to despicable life the character we love to hate.
In fact, three of the five actors play dual roles, and combined with all the flashbacks, visions and even actors switching roles in the middle of a scene, things can get complicated. But director Oanh Nguyen has come a long way from his geeky days playing a fat band geek on Hang Time, and he keeps the play focused on its examination of the obsessive compulsion to create timeless work.
Surprisingly, the limited space of the Chance Theater seems to give greater density to the philosophical predicament at the center of Inventing Van Gogh: whether Stone ought to choose to forge the portrait, re-write history, and live as a fraud for eternity-or remain a miserable, dirt-poor artist who may never be discovered.
INVENTING VAN GOGH, AT THE CHANCE THEATER, 5552 E. LA PALMA AVE., ANAHEIM HILLS, (714) 777-3033; WWW.CHANCETHEATER.COM. SAT., 4 P.M.; SUN., 6 P.M. THROUGH MAR. 11. $22-$25.
[top]
