The 'Mona Lisa' stole the heart of this art thief
It's 1911 and someone has stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre - and that's no fiction. Vincenzo Peruggia, once a workman at the museum, took Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece from its case, hid it under his clothing, and left undetected.
It's 1911 and someone has stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre - and that's no fiction. Vincenzo Peruggia, once a workman at the museum, took Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece from its case, hid it under his clothing, and left undetected.
According to Art Lover, Jules Tasca's new play running through the weekend as part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, the Italian immigrant - bedazzled by the painting and obsessed with the woman it depicts - kept Mona Lisa for two years in the shabby Paris apartment he shared with a former prostitute he'd fallen for. Peruggia said she reminded him of the woman in the painting.
Tasca invites us to consider whether Peruggia, his girlfriend, and the Mona Lisa were actually a love triangle. That may sound outlandish, but there's solid evidence to pose the possibility: In Peruggia's own writings he addressed both the woman and the painting with similar adoration.
If you didn't know the story's premise was real, Tasca's play would seem too far-fetched. In fact, the drama supports the theory that truth can be stranger than fiction. While the interchanges between Peruggia and Mathilde, his lover, about love and marriage and the Mona Lisa come from Tasca's imagination, you sense the possibility that something was said along those lines - of which there are too many; Art Lover would be more muscular were it less talky. It also takes itself too seriously. This couple share nary a smile, let alone a laugh. Their patter has a constant intensity.
Still, the play works nicely as it builds to the question of the love triangle, when its various pieces begin to jell. Alex Mandell (he even looks like Peruggia, or at least like the police photo) and Illiana Hubbard play out their relationship in Maggie Baker's good-looking French street clothes. Mandell speaks his role in Italian-accented English but Hubbard's Parisian girl comes with straightforward American English, as if the production had engaged a dialect coach at half price.
Art Lover is a project of Tasca and its director, Drucie McDaniel, two longtime theater artists who also teach at the University of the Arts, where the show is staged in the 16th-floor Caplan Studio at 211 S. Broad St. McDaniel moves the two characters around Q. Brian Sickels' sparse apartment set nicely, except for the times when each talks directly to the audience after walking into already shining spotlights, which makes the show appear to have had too little technical run-through time. In fact, the opening-night performance Thursday seemed under-rehearsed on the whole, with more than a few quick stumbles over lines by the otherwise fine actors.
It's the second world-premiere PIFA theater piece I've seen with clear signs of too little preparation. New plays frequently suffer from not enough rehearsal time and no funding to support more, but in a festival with a $10 million price tag, that's not just ironic. It's unacceptable.
Art Lover
Presented by Drama Works Wonders as part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts at the Caplan Studio Theater, 16th floor, 211 S. Broad St. Tickets: $5-$10. Information: 215-546-7432 or www.pifa.org. EndText