Three of the characters in Jon Robin Baitz’s Ten Unknowns are denizens of the art world, so when a young biologist shows up in the Night of the Iguana setting where the suppliers and demanders of artistic commodity are tussling, you sniff the air for metaphor. Sure enough, the aroma is as strong as turpentine in this well-crafted if not entirely convincing drama about art and authenticity. Still, this may be Baitz’s best play since his eloquent 1990 debut, The Substance of Fire. And at the Huntington Theatre Company, where it is set in a towering colored-plaster mausoleum by designer Adam Stockhausen, it boasts the star of both the stage and film versions of The Substance of Fire, Ron Rifkin.
The biologist is graduate student Julia Bryant, who has arrived at the play’s remote Mexican location to post lookout at a local lake for a translucent frog that may or may not be extinct. Also possibly extinct is aging, embittered, mescal-saturated artist Malcolm Raphelson, a promising figurative painter of the 1940s displaced by Abstract Expressionism and living in self-imposed exile where the liquor is cheap and the frogs have disappeared. As the frogs were " swallowed whole by big-mouth bass, " so Malcolm was expunged from his emergent place on the New York art scene (where he had been featured in a 1949 exhibit of WPA artists titled " 10 Unknowns " ) by Jackson Pollock and the like. As things heat up, the metaphor gets banged like an anvil, with one character remarking on the " cold-bloodedness " shared by amphibians and art. In the end, both sleep with the fishes.
As the play opens, it is 1992 and Malcolm is being pressured by visiting New York agent Trevor Fabricant, who is convinced that the conceptual outrages of the Whitney Biennial have pushed the pendulum back toward representational art and that it’s thus time for a Raphelson retrospective. " People want authenticity again, " he declares — though the act-one curtain, which explicates the working relationship between Malcolm and his drug-addicted, Trevor-provided assistant, Judd Sturgess, yields a (to Baitz’s credit, unexpected) revelation regarding Malcolm’s validity.
" The play tries to look at simply how hard it is to remain authentic as an artist, over the course of one’s creative life, " says Baitz. It also tries to assign import to inspiration, versus execution, in the creation of art and takes a hard look at the cannibalistic nature of mentoring. Judd, Malcolm’s assistant and surrogate son (as well as Trevor’s ex-lover), is locked in a symbiotic conflict with the Hemingway-esque older artist from which the only escape (to appropriate another Baitz metaphor) proves to be an abortion, since no custody arrangement is possible.
Baitz is a playwright with whom — because of his close association with Huntington artistic director Nicholas Martin and his designation as the first commissionee of the Stanford Calderwood Fund for New American Plays — Boston audiences are apt to become familiar. His plays, given their moral concerns, have been compared to those of Arthur Miller. I would also ally them, with their studied metaphors applied to artistic and political issues, to the works of Athol Fugard. Fugard’s plays, however, are naturally populated by South Africans; the nation recovering from apartheid is his home. Baitz, who spent his teen years there, has dealt with South Africa more relevantly in The Film Society and A Fair Country. Here there is no reason for mercenary art agent Trevor to be a white South African other than that he is corrupt. It’s no surprise, then, that Trevor’s character lacks the dimension of the other three, whom Baitz develops as human beings, however flawed.
At the Huntington, under the direction of Evan Yionoulis, head of the graduate-acting program at the Yale School of Drama, the play features aptly Latinate music by Rick Baitz and is, for the most part, well acted. T. Scott Cunningham makes the most of Trevor’s breezily feral mercantilism. And Kathryn Hahn, despite some overacting with her abdomen, does her best with the witness character of Julia, who is alleged to be 28 but comes across as younger, nervous about giving Malcolm the come-hither but almost spiritual in her praying-handed attempt to save him. Rifkin, as Malcolm, keeps his teeth out of the scenery, creating a self-loathing yet invigorated character given to bursts of defensiveness confused with command, with the controlled stagger of the perpetually inebriated. Best is Jonathan M. Woodward as Judd, who moves from hip pot-headedness to quivering heroin withdrawal while maintaining a lanky, loping, resentful-son persona. Baitz voices a number of the concerns that dog the artist, but he has advanced beyond the category of " 10 Unknowns. "
