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Abstract Expression
Abstract Expression
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Author: Theresa Rebeck Publisher: Samuel French (cover image may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 104 Pub. Date: 2010 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0573642451 ISBN-13: 9780573642456 Cast Size: 3 female, 6 male
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About the Play:
Abstract Expression is a full-length dramatic comedy by Theresa Rebeck. After a scathing review 15 years ago, a once-celebrated painter faded into impoverished obscurity. Can one chance encounter resurrect this volatile artist from obscurity and re-launch him to overnight success? Abstract Expression is an examination of the New York art scene, art and commerce, and the intermingled lives of three families.
Abstract Expression is about a jaded, bitter painter whose sudden rediscovery sends his life into a tailspin. A famous and now nearly forgotten artist has been working in
seclusion for years, supported by his high-school drop-out daughter.
When he is rediscovered and launched to fame, questions are provoked:
Who gets to define which art is good? Can one divorce the art from the
artist? Who owns a work of art? Undercurrents of social injustice and
hypocrisy run beneath this drama filled with biting humor and tragedy,
all set in the complex realities of the New York art world. Theresa Rebeck skillfully compares the gritty urban realities of lives lived on the edge with the capricious intrigues of the uptown gallery scene, where fame might just be a matter of who you know, and reputations can be bought and sold.
Abstract Expression premiered in 1998 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. Since then the play has been mounted by regional, college, and community
theatres.
Cast: 3 female, 6 male
What people say:
"Ms. Rebeck writes passionlessly about passion, colorlessly about art, self-importantly about the poor, tritely about the rich, humorlessly about the ludicrousness of art as commerce." — The New York Times
"Meaningful questions of morality, aesthetics and class conflict." — The Seattle Times
"Underneath her satirical surface, equal to the best of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in The School for Scandal, Rebeck rekindles the troubling assertion that it was the support of the political, financial and artistic establishment that made possible the triumph of absract expressionist paintings and transferred the capital of the art world from Paris to New York." — New Haven Register
About the Playwright:
Theresa Rebeck is an American playwright, director, television
writer, and novelist. She is the most Broadway-produced female
playwright of our time. Her plays include Bad Dates, Omnium
Gatherum (co-written, Pulitzer finalist), Spike Heels, and
Mauritius, which won Boston's prestigious IRNE and Elliot
Norton Awards. Her work in television includes NYPD Blue for which
she has won the Peabody, the Writer's Guild, and the Mystery Writers
of America's Edgar awards.
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Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros
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