"Impressionism' on Broadway

The curtain-call kiss: every woman in the audience had waited all show long for it, and finally— after the play had ended-- Jeremy Irons gave Joan Allen a twirl, an embrace, and then a Big Smooch. OOOH, we all said.

Michael Jacobs's soggy play concerns an aging (but still fabulously attractive) photographer named Thomas (Jeremy Irons, clearly aware of his fabulosity) and Katherine, a younger but let's face it middle-aged art gallery owner (Joan Allen, sleek and elegantly dressed— and those shoes!). This is chick lit, an inspirational sitcom masquerading as a highbrow play about Art. If Oprah had a theater club, Impressionism would be her pick.

The play is structured around scenes staged as if they were paintings, while the pictures that hang in the gallery create each occasion. For example, Katherine is especially fond of a Mary Cassatt aquatint because, we learn through a flashback to her childhood, it reminds her of sitting on her mother's lap after a bath on the traumatic day when her father left them both.

Cliché flashbacks

Another picture causes her to recall—and us to see—Katherine in love with a painter (Irons) when she was 30. She poses for him in a scene that echoes her towel-wrapped nakedness as a child. These scenes are intended to shed light on Katherine's stunted emotional life, but they're more a series of clichés than convincing psychological insights.

Marsha Mason plays a brash woman ("I may be the last person in America with any money"), determined to buy the Cassatt as a present for her pregnant daughter. She knows that her daughter's love will soon shift from mother to new child, but she also knows that's the way it should be. In a moment of embarrassing blatantness, a scrim of Whistler's Mother descends and winks.

Continuing the theme of loving children, Thomas's National Geographic photograph of an African boy sitting in an acacia tree against a brilliant sunset evokes a painful memory in which Andre deShields plays the boy's goofy grandfather in Tanzania. To protect himself from this recollection, Thomas keeps replacing the photograph with a Chagall, La Baie des Anges, even though Thomas, as a photographer, prefers realism (a fairly limited notion of photographic art but crucial for the play's argument).

A knowing smile from Irons

Thomas hides behind esoteric information about the world— he is a coffee pedant, and discourses on each brew's country of origin to conceal his stunted emotional life. There's a gratuitous little reference to "the real thing" when Irons allows a knowing smile to cross his face (Irons last appeared on Broadway in The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard).

DeShields reappears as the kindly owner of a bakery (cranberry muffins are somehow motivic) who gives us a short but sweet analysis of a painting of an old couple on a park bench, explaining it as evidence of enduring married love.

The stage is frequently washed in vivid impressionistic colors and patterns while Katherine and Thomas continue their verbal sparring, never seeing what is obvious: that they are perfect for each other. This notion of course supports the central, thematic idea of Impressionism: You can't "read" it if you're standing too close. Once Katherine and Thomas understand the need to take a step back, they can see it all clearly and, apparently, will live happily ever after.