| Nothing about THE COLLABORATION convinces. As depicted here, Warhol is fastidious and dazed and Basquiat impetuous and doomed. And that’s about it. The play, such as it is, neither finds nor elaborates their characters or their relationship. Instead, there’s a lot of depthless talk between the two that feels like a sort of Wikipedia summary, all highlights and bullet points. The writing is facile, lazy even. And, most remarkably given the subjects, it’s dull. It seems impossible that either man was this tedious. The first act yawns on and the second pogos around frantically. Watching these actors strain to enliven such lackluster material was cringe inducing. Neither performance succeeds even nearly as incarnation or even basic impersonation. THE COLLABORATION goes nowhere loudly and very, very slowly. It’s a lumbering, emphatic forgery. |
