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Don’t buy The Credeaux Canvas
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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The Credeaux Canvas
By Keith Bunin. Direction and set design by David Miller. Lighting by Darren Evans. Costumes by Tracy Campbell. With Joshua Rollins, Naeemah A. White-Peppers, Chris Loftus, and Renee Miller. Presented by Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through October 25.
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Keith Bunin’s The Credeaux Canvas, which is being given its first Boston production by Zeitgeist Stage Company, is a shambles of a play that purports to be about art, love, and vulnerability. Jamie (Chris Loftus), who’s been disinherited by his recently deceased art-dealer dad, cooks up a solvency scheme for himself, his struggling-singer girlfriend, Amelia (Naeemah A. White-Peppers), and his struggling-art-student roommate, Winston (Joshua Rollins). Amelia is to pose for Winston, who will create a "new" canvas and pass it off as a hidden treasure willed to Jamie by his father, the work of an obscure early-19th-century French artist named Credeaux. Just on the verge of being rediscovered, Credeaux’s work has never been catalogued, and Winston is obsessed with it; he’s also a gifted imitator. And Jamie has the perfect mark — a rich friend of his father’s who fancies herself more of an aficionado than she is. But things get complicated when Amelia, in the role of one of Credeaux’s prostitute models, has to pose in the nude for Winston. She’s nervous and uncomfortable, so he gets naked too — and then they both get psychically naked, if you’ll excuse the expression. She breaks through his customary emotional armor, and (to no one’s surprise except Jamie’s) they become lovers. Bunin’s use of metaphors — the Credeaux canvas and the nudity — is trite, and his idea of building characters is to write speeches for them to inform the audience of what their issues are. The big nude scene between Winston and Amelia is a series of revelations presented in the form of speeches that are piled one on top of another like freshly graded term papers. Bunin might as well be writing a book of audition monologues. When did American playwrights decide that it’s no longer necessary to dramatize their material? Bunin’s failure is echoed in the work of dozens of other current writers that is regularly picked up by companies like Playwrights’ Horizons and the Manhattan Theater Club. (This and Bunin’s other work, The World Over, were originally produced at Playwrights’ Horizons.) But The Credeaux Canvas is unusually clumsy. At the beginning of the second act, in the scene where the prospective buyer (Renee Miller) comes over to view the phony Credeaux, the play shifts directions and for 20 minutes or so sounds like an episode from a TV sit-com. Then, when Amelia’s entrance scuttles Jamie’s plot, the play returns to its previous tone of crippled earnestness. David Miller’s production exacerbates the dramatic problem. The performers act all over the stage; I’ve rarely seen so much damn acting. White-Peppers folds her hands demurely behind her neck or hugs herself, casts her eyes downward, and looks sensitive and sweet. Rollins stutters shyly and takes odd pauses, three or four to a sentence; all his lines come out exactly the same. She’s playing "honest soul" and "desperate for emotional commitment"; he’s playing "tortured artist" and "terrified of revealing who he really is." Loftus sails in every few scenes to play "damaged psyche beneath all that confident irony." But if there’s a single moment when anyone plays a simple objective, I missed it. My guess is that under other circumstances the performers might show themselves to be talented but that the combination of the stillborn play and Miller’s direction has hamstrung them, and they’ve fallen back on their most unfortunate impulses. A better director would get them to drop their affectations and stage them so that their movements through the apartment seem organic rather than arbitrary. (Miller did a nice job with the set, which he designed, but I never thought that the three really lived there.) So you don’t believe in any of the characters, and the substitution of precious, self-conscious emoting for the most basic acting-class shaping of the roles stalemates an already dramatically inert text. You go a little crazy waiting for the play to move forward, and two and a half hours — which would be way too long for this sort of play even if it were skillfully done — begins to seem like a life sentence.
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