In Tina Howe’s play at SOU, the audience watches a parade of museumgoers react, and amusingly overreact, to a gallery of artworks

By Lucie K. Scheuer for Ashland.news

Years ago, a friend wrote a short story about a middle-aged man’s musings over an oil painting of a horse, its legs forward thrusting in the air, with a noble rider on its back, hanging in a local museum. A somewhat serious yet pretentious art connoisseur, the man continues exclaiming over the detail in the painting, the brush strokes, attention to detail, the juxtaposition of the horse in relation to the background, the thrill it is giving him to gaze upon such a wondrous rendering. When the man has finally exhausted his avalanche of words, his friend, somewhat nonplussed, looks at the painting, then the man, and says, “Oh.”

There’s a lot of this type of observational somewhat surrealist humor, in Tina’s Howe’s short play “Museum” now on view at the Main Stage Theatre at Southern Oregon University. It is about 90 minutes of entertaining theater, as various museum regulars and newcomers wander through one of the main,  modernist exhibitions at a popular gallery. Their response to the artworks is delightfully amusing, exuberantly overdone and deliberately more interesting than the artworks themselves.

Direction by David Kelly

This is a very short work with a very large cast. Director David Kelly has done an excellent job of coordinating 22 cast members and 44 characters, constantly mooning over, emoting about or moving through the main exhibition. He has manipulated the timing and coordinated the characters so that they become part of the exhibition.

From the corner a security guard insists: “It’s against museum regulations to photograph the artwork” as people continue to do so. In the background you hear lost visitors being redirected: “Colonial quilts and weathervanes are on the third floor.”

And during the constant comings and goings of the museum visitors, you see a bit of the human condition on display also. A Parisian couple, histrionic and hugely animated, gush over various works in French. Suddenly their passion spills over into their viewing experience and we see them arguing and pulling away in real time.

Several visitors comment about an incident that occurred earlier that day, in which a vandal shot off the face of Botticelli’s Venus in Europe. The conversation becomes more about how this would never happen in an American museum rather than this terrible act of desecration.

Eccentric art lovers

Another person gushes, “I need to be alone with the things I love.” One woman who seems to have been struck with a case of “objectophilia” is so enamored of a sculpture made of natural materials, she tries to take it with her. The whole scene begins to resemble an acid trip from a ’60s movie.

There is work exhibited on one wall titled “The Broken Silence,” consisting of a series of seemingly unrelated outfits, including a wedding dress, hung on a rack. This inert display suddenly generates great excitement. We’re not sure why. There’s no accounting for taste, one guesses.

There are the comparisons to Robert Rauschenberg’s minimalist paintings, as blank canvases hang about, with references toward Dadaism and its lean toward absurdist representation. The viewers just have to decide if they care.

Effective design work

Kudos to costume designer, SiSi Keshon, whose outfits are indicative of the ’60s and ’70s, from hippie leggings to tailored blouses with collars. Felicity Kountz’s attention to detail and her cleverness with the staging is admirable. Hats off to scenic designer Sean O’Skea. The sterile, white look and feel of a museum, with it’s odd angles, sometimes disorienting cubicles and displays, is eye-catching and jarring. Effective lighting from Kody Cava and sound from Jonah Raleigh add to the museum vibe.

Playwright Tina Howe, who died at 85 in 2023, captures the many lenses and sensibilities through which people view and want to possess art. How “appreciation” is truly “in the eye of the beholder.”

She also doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at the supercilious approach art admirers sometimes take. At the same time, one can see her smiling down on the dreamers, artists, and viewers of their creations.

Ashland resident Lucie K. Scheuer is a former copy editor and staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, where her work included features, reviews and a column on films in production. Email her at [email protected].