Culture war Art imitates controversy in Permanent Collection BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Permanent Collection By Thomas Gibbons. Directed by Adam Zahler. Set by Anita Fuchs. Costumes by Nancy Leary. Lighting by Christopher Ostrom. With Clark Jackson, Sylvia Ann Soares, Benjamin Evett, Paul D. Farwell, Giselle Jones, and Tracy Oliverio. At New Repertory Theatre through December 12.

The large approximations of Cézanne and Matisse that dominate the set of Permanent Collection are black and white, and so is the treatment of issues. Still, Thomas Gibbons’s play, which debuted at Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre in 2003 and is receiving a well-performed area premiere at New Repertory Theatre, presents a skirmish of art and race in which there is firepower. The play takes its inspiration from the stormy legal and money-draining goings-on at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. There, a controversial African-American CEO endeavored to amend the by-laws of the venerable art institution founded in the ’20s by Dr. Albert Barnes so that paintings could tour, among other changes. The fight led to suits in which the race card was played and which came close to bankrupting the Barnes, a shrine to the Impressionist giants built in a wealthy white suburb by a collector who also revered African art and left control of his foundation to a primarily African-American university.

Bee-Luther-Hatchee author Gibbons, who is white, borrows heavily from the Barnes flap but uses the situation as a frame for a polarized on-stage argument about who has the right to choose what goes up on the museum wall and what ought to motivate that choice: a collector’s vision, art-establishment judgments, political correctness, or personal response. In Permanent Collection, Sterling North, a polished African-American fresh from success in the corporate world, arrives in his Jag to take over the Morris Foundation, not a hair of whose mighty collection has been disturbed since 1952. A tour of the institution’s storage galleries reveals a number of significant African pieces, and the new honcho proposes a change to the foundation’s by-laws that would allow some of the stored works to be placed in the main galleries, thus ruffling the rigid concept of founding collector Alfred Morris, whose tweedy, art-establishment-hating ghost wanders in and out of the play, bespeaking his reverence for the "Negro" art he nonetheless relegated to storage. North’s determination to shake things up puts him in conflict with long-time foundation director of education Paul Barrow, an impassioned, earnest art geek who adheres not only to Morris’s studied arrangement of the art on display to show "reciprocal influence" but also to the collector’s right to dictate from beyond the grave.

For North, "visibility" is the issue in giving more prominent place to priceless and empowering pieces of African art, the consignment of which to storage he considers "discriminatory." When Barrow suggests that the pieces be lent to another museum, an African-American art museum, North agrees on condition that the white art historian can say he has ever been there, which he has not. Eventually, the fight between elitism and political correctness gets hotter than a Robert Brustein/August Wilson debate, with North accusing Barrow of racism, Barrow’s career plunging faster than the value of an unmasked forgery, and the enraged scholar finally getting agitated enough to holler that "Shakespeare is better than folk tales! Bach is better than rap!"

Gibbons’s play is talky and schematic. Each act begins with one of its two principals asking us to "put yourself in my place," the arriving North describing the inevitable consequences of DWB — "driving while black" — and the ostracized Barrow raging at the conflagration of his career "on a pyre of racial diversity." Much of the play consists of dust-ups between the two in which they cleave more to their own agendas than listen to each other’s words. Under Adam Zahler’s direction, Clark Jackson, as the quick-trigger but media-savvy North, and Benjamin Evett, as the naive Barrow, both give complex performances that incorporate their characters’ convictions as well as their flaws. (Gibbons, however, attributes more ruthlessness to North.)

Also on hand are a scoop-seeking suburban reporter (Tracy Oliverio), who lights a few matches, and North’s young black assistant, Kanika, who’s likably played by Giselle Jones. Sylvia Ann Soares does duty as a long-time African-American administrator at the Morris who in a coda that echoes the still-unresolved Barnes crisis is left to pick up the pieces as the financially troubled institution prepares to relocate. Meanwhile, Barrow, bearing blood money, pays a last pre-move visit to a Cézanne Mont Sainte-Victoire that is his favorite.

In his portrayal of populist art connoisseur Morris, Gibbons borrows directly from the writings of Dr. Albert Barnes when he has the ghost of collector Morris (a more amiable than irascible Paul D. Farwell) declaim that "through the compelling powers of his poetry and music, the American Negro is revealing to the rest of the world the essential oneness of all human beings." Oneness is a fine-sounding concept that Permanent Collection, looking the divisiveness of the culture wars in the face, has the guts to contradict.