Tina Howe's "Museum' at Villanova

Tina Howe's Museum is the first of her 12 plays, two of which have won Pulitzers. Does it need revival now? I would say, more than ever, and especially in Philadelphia.

Museum has its flaws. It's a single 90-minute act that resembles at times a "Saturday Night Live" sketch that refuses to quit. The setting is a museum exhibit on its closing day. The exhibit is called, with a fine ear for curatorial pretentiousness, "Broken Silences," and consists of the work of three artists: an Ellsworth Kelly-like arrangement of four slightly asymmetrical canvases, all painted or— as the script indicates— sprayed white; a clothes rack on which mannequins in different dress hang; and a series of small sculptures composed of organic materials.

In Villanova's current production, directed by Joanna Rotté, these are the works of three actual artists— Lawrence Anastasi, Heather McLaughlin and Ward van Haute— and the audience is itself invited to come onstage to view them at the play's end. The joke, in other words, is not on the art but on its setting, and on the characters' reactions to it.

To the setting, first. Museums, as public spaces, are an invention of the 19th and 20th Centuries, the outgrowth of private curiosity cabinets and public salons. Like zoos, they were developed in the heyday of imperialism to display booty and exotica.

Art replaces religion

Works of art came to the fore only slowly, and art museums only gradually branched off from other kinds of exhibition spaces. As the public art market expanded, works certified by professional experts and connoisseurs as "great," especially those of Old Masters, acquired cachet, and cities hankering for status built museums and competed to fill them.

As the religion of art began to replace more traditional forms of worship, a tension developed between works of art and the museums that housed them. On the one hand, great works defined their museums— the Louvre has many treasures, but in some sense it is the Mona Lisa— while, on the other, the purchase of works by a museum conferred stature on the artist, living or dead.

Given that works of art owned by museums were, by definition, of "museum quality," the museumgoer was pre-assured that what he was exposed to was of rare interest and high value. If he didn't agree, the fault was his own.

With the soaring art market, aesthetic valuation was gradually overlaid by the commercial kind. You could reject a Picasso on the wall, but not 40 million bucks.

Like department stores

Museums insensibly changed their self-presentation, too. They were no longer mere churches of art but at the same time high-end emporiums, like the kind of department store whose window display is so intimidating that you feel pauperized at the thought of entering the door. Of course, since the merchandise wasn't for sale, you paid at the point of entry.

This redefined the public museum as a site of consumption, a place where you bought an experience (or had one because you had paid for it). To ensure the experience, museums began to sell packaged tours and headsets. But when the viewer doesn't respond himself to the work, and accepts someone else's canned reduction of it, it becomes "description" rather than experience, thus destroying the relation between the artist and the viewer and, in effect, effacing the work itself.

This is precisely the point at which Museum opens. The guards, summoned by loudspeaker, are informed that Botticelli's Birth of Venus has just been shredded by a maniac opening fire on it in the Uffizi. Properly fortified, they face the day. The public is the enemy at the gates, but the gates must be opened, for what is a museum without patrons?

What do you see?

Ionesco would have fun with this premise, but Howe's sights are set more on the quotidian than the absurd. The visitors come, singly or in twos and threes, displaying varying degrees of ignorance, distraction or pseudo-sophistication. What they all exhibit is unease. The modern spectator can trust anything except his own untutored perception; art is exactly that which exceeds his understanding.

Consequently there is simply no way to behave in front of an artwork; whatever one's footing, it's the wrong one. When Howe's characters try to explain what they think they are seeing, they mimic the lingo of guides, and thus wind up lecturing themselves.

At the opposite extreme, they resort to ridicule— what kind of painting is just a white surface?— but, equally unsure of their judgments, they act the part of clowns.

Hip, gay, been there, done that

Representative of the first type is a gay male couple gushing over Rauschenberg and talking knowingly about museum politics and pricing strategies. You've seen the type: they're hip, nothing will ever catch them by surprise, and nothing will ever be new: If they haven't seen it before, they've anticipated it, because art is a species of fashion that changes as predictably as the phases of the moon.

At the other extreme is a trio of middle-aged females who roar in, gawking and squawking, so terrified of behaving inappropriately that they can't do anything else.

Some visitors come armored, plugged into audio systems that relieve them of the burden of seeing or reacting, and of course silencing them as well; frozen in place, they mimic the Duane Hanson sculptures that depict weary urbanites like themselves. Others hide behind cameras or sketchpads.

A suspicious-looking character in a trench coat and hat— a flasher? a terrorist?— draws hostile looks, but he too is only wearing his version of armor.

Mannequins attacked

Little dramas come and go. A French couple experience a marital meltdown; a distraught woman searches for her companions. A solitary (but sizable) guard serves as a ringmaster for the disorder, his proprietary sense of the gallery reflecting that of his superiors, referred to but (except for a flying appearance by the curator) unseen.

At the end of the day, repressed impulse breaks through as the mannequins are attacked and their limbs snapped off. It isn't pumping lead into Botticelli, but it is a revolt against a setup whose participants are left feeling suckered and vaguely but unmistakably mocked.

And the theater audience? We are invited to mock, too, but also to recognize ourselves. When we walk the stage space after the show, we follow in the steps of the characters we've just laughed at, and whose places we often enough assume in real life.

Anti-art on the Parkway

We, too, are somehow tempted to smash things— dehumanizing structures and institutions— without quite understanding why. Museums seem far down on a list that includes banks and corporations, but we feel, uneasily, that they are robbing us of a common heritage it was once their responsibility to protect.

That was always, perhaps, a naÓ¯ve assumption, but there was a time when it seemed to be true, and a place where it seemed possible it would become true— the Barnes Foundation. The mockery of that vision now rising on the Ben Franklin Parkway is the culmination of much that has been degraded in our culture, and a portent of further debasement to come: the first anti-art museum.

Strategic silences

Museum was written in 1977, when museums weren't yet fully commercialized, and art wasn't yet a wholly mystified product for the new nouveaux riche. The Villanova production moves its 41-member cast smartly about, and the pacing, never forced, never flags either. This is no small feat in a play that's essentially a series of vignettes in a single tight frame, and Rotté risks some strategic silences that succeed only within the carefully balanced tensions that enfold them, including the one— added by her— that concludes the show.

Among the alert and able performances, Michael Jansen's Guard stands out, and Janus Stefanowicz's costumes are unfailingly droll and inventive.

Finally, the contributing artists themselves render the production distinctive. The artwork in Museum is usually left to the property shop, but that makes too easy a target for satire. What art is, how it is displayed and whose purposes it serves— these are questions that, as it were, hang together, and behoove us to consider. That's the serious subtext of Howe's still-witty play.