MODIGLIANI
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McIntyre introduces his hero by having him tumble to the street with his trousers around his knees. Modigliani has just wreaked mayhem in a fashionable restaurant–jumping on the tables, scattering china and glassware, snatching food, and finally flashing a general before falling through the front window. In the next scene we meet Maurice Utrillo, who is plotting the murder of his mother’s lover, and Chaim Soutine, who is plotting the theft of a beef carcass–not to eat, though both artists complain of chronic starvation, but to paint. They are both drunk, dirty, and ragged and periodically break into abortive bouts of halfhearted fisticuffs. Modigliani enters, his hand cut and bleeding, and the three of them plot to rob the owner of the bar in which they’re drinking. They fail in this attempt–three against one, and they fail–and run away.
McIntyre has obviously done extensive research into the life of his subject–so much research that he seems to have forgotten that the object of his study is also a character in a play, about whom we must be presumed to know nothing. As impossible as it may be in real life to distinguish between the habitual fuckup who will go on to do great things someday and the habitual fuckup who will self-destruct in a matter of weeks, the playwright must make it inarguably clear to his audience that his protagonist has a value that justifies–or at least mitigates–his annoying behavior. McIntyre, however, pushes only the most facile or ludicrous buttons to elicit our sympathy. Modigliani moons the restaurant patron because “Jews don’t drop their pants to important generals,” as if the gesture were somehow less stupid and childish when executed by a member of an oppressed minority. (To make sure we understand that he is oppressed, McIntyre has Utrillo call Modigliani anti-Semitic names, even though they’re supposed to be the closest of friends.) Modigliani rapes his mistress because he wants her to bear his child, as if forced impregnation were any less cruel and selfish for being motivated by paternal intentions. By the time Modigliani finally meets with a potentially helpful art dealer and proceeds to bluff, beg, brag, name-drop, and lie his way through the interview–in short, screw it up seven ways from Sunday–we are neither interested nor surprised. We’ve seen this sad sack do virtually everything under the sun to bring misfortune on himself. Equally foolish are Soutine, who hasn’t the brains to eat the food he steals, and Utrillo, who lacerates his hands trying to lap up wine from a broken bottle.
