Yellow Heat: Vincent van Gogh in Arles
I love their historical and theatrical excesses, the way they create myths even as they debunk legends. I love the fantastical melodrama unleashed by the alchemy of poverty and creativity, the struggle that pits artists against themselves and the culture that created them. And when the artist inevitably goes down in a blaze of self-destructive glory, and the voice-over repeats words from the artist’s diary or letters, I listen like a devotee, with renewed faith that the art left behind makes the struggle worthwhile. Other critics can have their Andrew Lloyd Webber lyrical pyrotechnics, their David Mamet gritty psychodramas. If theater must be squeezed into a formula, give me a play like Yellow Heat.
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Directed by Next Theatre’s managing director, Peter Rybolt, Yellow Heat depicts the seven-month period in 1888 when the painter was at the height of his ambition and his desperation, producing paintings at the rate of one a day. Local playwright Allan Bates opens his well-crafted, well-researched work with Joseph (Ralph Flores), the postmaster of the town and the artist’s friend and moral support, as the narrator. He tells the story of van Gogh’s attempt to found a studio with Paul Gauguin, a device that frames the artists’ relationship with the provincial concerns of Arles. From the first scene Rybolt pushes his cast at a frenzied pace, fueled by van Gogh’s peripatetic anxiety and compulsive painting. Bruce Orendorf as van Gogh is a cross between hyperactive child and religious visionary, constantly overstimulated by light and color and obsessed with easing the lives of coal miners, peasants who live without beauty or hope of light’s comfort.
The ideal of the mad artist is a two-sided coin. It’s deadly to live by: generally, mad artists are not very productive. Van Gogh killed himself soon after the peaceful last scene of Bates’s drama. But flip the coin and you find the myth behind Yellow Heat, defining art as a force simultaneously inside and outside society, individual and yet larger than the artist. Our romantic image of the antisocial artist as the force that defines and creates culture seduces us with its predictability and its strange hopefulness. It satisfies our need to believe in the ecstasy of creation. And in a solidly crafted play like Yellow Heat, it reminds us to risk our selves for our vision and embrace the eccentricities that make us whole.
