Art Bums

By T.E. Kalem

MODIGLIANI

by Dennis Mclntyre

Amedeo Modigliani died at 35 of tuberculosis and the cumulative ravages of drink and drugs. Amedeo means "beloved of God," but Modigliani died bone poor and with no hint of the acclaim his paintings would posthumously receive. Yet the play at Greenwich Village's Astor Place Theater is full of fun, fire and faith, a boozy tribute to art, love and the strange creative uses of adversity.

Modigliani is a portrait of the artist as a Montparnasse bum, or rather three: Modigliani's companions are his fellow painters and fellow flops--as the 1916 taste makers viewed them--Maurice Utrillo and Chaim Soutine. Utrillo (Ethan Phillips) is in thrall to two false gods, alcohol and his mother. Soutine (George Gerdes) is a color addict equally intoxicated by the stains on a butcher's apron and the veins of a plucked chicken. Led by Modigliani (Jeffrey de Munn), these Three Musketeers of the Night smash up cheap restaurants, cadge drinks, slash their canvases in frustrated rage and collapse in wild laughter at their own absurdity.

Modigliani has both a sensual solace and a fiery challenge in his English mistress and nude model, Beatrice Hastings. Mary-Joan Negro plays this role with such formidable passion and intelligence as to conjure up Goethe's "eternal feminine" as the root impulse of creation. Wisely, touchingly, Playwright Dennis Mclntyre treats of the artist's self-arming ego and his nightmares of self-doubt. In the title role, Jeffrey de Munn is protean, a mercurial mixture of earth, air, fire and water.

--T.E. Kalem

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