Quick! Which 17th-century female artist fought her way into the male-dominated art world, prevailed in a rape trial and alchemized her struggles into revolutionary art? If the name Artemisia Gentileschi doesn’t leap to one’s lips, Kate Hamill’s play “The Light and the Dark” at 59E59 Theaters offers a generous introduction.
Heavy emphasis on “introduction.” Much of the information in the play’s 145 minutes will be familiar to anyone who has spent time reading Gentileschi’s Wikipedia page or has seen other recent plays inspired by her life.
There are two Artemisias in the show: the historical Baroque painter and a docent-like narrator. Both are played by Hamill, who has unwisely asked the narrator to ride shotgun to the artist. Under the slack direction of Jade King Carroll, “The Light and the Dark” often feels more like an art history lecture than a play. The first act, especially, hews much too closely to biographical exposition. Standing next to a blank canvas on a set that evokes of an artist’s studio, Artemisia talks to us about the art of composition before taking us back in time to her youth.
As a child, she idolizes first the work of her father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon, posed like an off-duty Greek statue), then Caravaggio, whose works of fleshy realism crack the world open for her. The entrance of Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldivar), a papal painter who frequents Orazio’s studio, spells trouble. He contrives to spend more time alone with Artemisia; during one of his visits, after he has bribed the Gentileschi’s serving woman (a versatile Joey Parsons) to vacate the room, he rapes Artemisia.
Strangely, no mention is made of her three younger brothers, who also trained as apprentices to Orazio and who might have served as dramatic counterpoints for the young female artist.
More consequentially, Hamill, who is one of the most produced playwrights in the country, departs from the historical record in a trial scene. Court records of the rape trial preserved at the Archivio di Stato in Rome show that Artemisia averred that she threw a knife at Tassi after he raped her the first time; in the play, she simply lets it drop by her side. “I am not a heroine of some old story. I cannot hold the knife,” she says meekly.
The art critic Dave Hickey wrote that “talk is art’s optimum climate” — an idea that is gloriously affirmed in Sam Kissajukian’s “300 Paintings,” a bracing one-man show at Vineyard Theater.
Unfolding like a work of origami, the show is many things: a candid exploration of the Australian comedian’s bipolar disorder, wrapped in a whistle-stop art tour and enfolded in a stand-up comedy routine. Despite its several PowerPoint slides, the performance never feels like a chalky lecture.
Its premise — Kissajukian quit comedy in 2021 and spends much of his acts-grinding show critiquing his own art — initially calls to mind another ouroboros-like work by another Australian comedian: Hannah Gadsby’s anti-comedy special “Nanette.”
Like Gadsby — and the British comedian James Acaster, who has also talked about quitting comedy — Kissajukian refuses to make heavy weather of his mental health struggles and is unafraid to reveal the crooked timber of his humanity, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, which came into clearest relief for him during a five-month manic spell.
What he lost in sleep and melanin during the coronavirus pandemic, he more than made up for in a series of striking paintings. The titular works, which are projected on a large screen and many of which adorn the walls of the Vineyard Theater, spilled out of him during bouts of lucid dreaming. They include personal portraits, Joseph Cornell-like vivariums and impish, Keith Haring-esque drawings.
It’s not long before the untutored artist attracts attention from the art world: He is invited, twice, to exhibit his work at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
Genially grouchy jokes take pride of place in the show, but some of Kissajukian’s blunt-force observations don’t work as well as others: He lazily calls van Gogh the “best artist” because he had five different types of mental illness. “I’m really looking into how to get more,” he tells us, tossing unnecessary logs onto the tortured-artist fire.
But for the most part, one marvels at Kissajukian’s ability to advance two provocative ideas for every one retracted. One of his best bits includes the creation of a business proposition to run a business that makes no money.
A fleet 65 minutes, the show breezes by. In the spirit of salons, “300 Paintings” also invites audience members to immerse themselves in Kissajukian’s art after the show — and to talk about it.
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