The Man Who Disappears
Posted by David New on 3/16/2009The first line spoken in Art is, “My friend Serge has bought a painting. It’s a canvas about five feet by four: white. The background is white and if you screw up your eyes you can make out some fine, white, diagonal lines.”
The final line of the play is, “My friend Serge, who is one of my oldest friends, has bought a painting. It’s a canvas about five feet by four. It represents a man who moves across a space, then disappears.”
But who is the man who disappears?
In post-show discussions, audience members have identified a number of ways to interpret the line. There is the literal – the stick figure that Marc drew on the painting in felt-tip pen disappears when cleaned by Marc and Serge. Then there is the imaginary figure that Marc says he “sees” skiing down a hill in the painting behind the obscuring snow. There is Yvan, the former jokester who is preparing to get married. There is Serge, Marc’s mentee who has moved beyond the role of student and formed his own point of view about art. And finally there is Marc himself – perhaps the man he has been of late will disappear as he moves into the new phase of relationship with his two friends.
I think this idea of “disappearing” can be extrapolated to the larger question the play addresses – the one of sustaining long-term relationships. Whether it be friendship, family, or marriage, perhaps we have to allow the other person to “disappear” and re-emerge so that we see them anew. Rather than try to limit a person to our idea of them, we must acknowledge that people grow and evolve.