VINCENT

Theatre at St. Clements
423 West 46th St.
1 April-5 June

Written by Leonard Nimoy
Directed by: Dr. Brant Pope
Starring: James Briggs

Vincent Van Gogh was not only a prodigious painter, but a prodigious letter writer as well. His many hundreds of letters to his brother Theo have been compiled into books, biographies, and plays. Leonard Nimoy’s VINCENT is one such play.

A one-man play in which an actor is mostly reading letters is a tricky proposition. Keeping it moving and giving it a dramatic arc are not easy, and this production, unfortunately, falls prey to that. Moving awkwardly from letter to speech to different letter to different speech, James Briggs gives a shallow performance that never feels true to the devotion Theo had for Vincent. With his eye-rolling and see-what-I-mean takes to the audience, Briggs comes across more like a teenage stepbrother discussing his wacky new family rather than having a connection so deep, that he died soon after his brother’s death. Briggs never seems to fully understand why he is telling this story in the first place. Ostensibly, it is to tell those who knew Vincent that he wasn’t crazy, but his own reactions to the stories he tells does not bear that out.

The set design and lighting work hard to keep it moving, and the images of the paintings and drawings are lovely, but nothing can overcome the lack of depth in the performance.

- Jean Tait -