How funny, just now, that playwrights should be imagining painters as heroes. We live at a time when contemporary painting, like playwriting itself, is a congeries of fragmented movements rattled by decades of chasing after markets, bombarded with questions about its aesthetic validity and function. The great painter people look to as a touchstone of their time seems not only a vanished figure but a vanished concept. But the authors of this week's unveilings are hip to the problem: One has invented a painter whose work embodies violent self-sacrifice; the other, an artist who functions best while imagining himself as someone else. The first abandons his life-threatening canvases in favor of a video, sacrificing other people's privacy instead of his own life. The second, during the play's action, becomes a forger. Not a pretty picture, if my colleagues on the Art page will excuse... More >>>