Abstract Expression

Dramatic Comedy

Characters: 6 male, 3 female

Unit Set

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? 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.

"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