Caravaggio is dark-meat theatre

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Caravaggio plays through April 26 at City Players Theatre, 439 N. Sixth Ave., Friday and Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Monday 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $14, with student discounts available Sunday and Monday.

Caravaggio, now playing at the recently assembled City Players Theatre Company on 6th Ave., is one of these dark-meat varieties. It is a play about one of this millennium's most influential-yet-startling painters. In the 16th-17th centuries, during a time when it was still chic to believe in the divinity of saints, Caravaggio painted biblical characters in dungarees. Gardner's Art Through the Ages states that one of his critics called him the "anti-Christ of painting."

Caravaggio plays up the artist's dark side. It is about the painter's epiphanic experiences along the way to discovering his mature chiaroscuro (light-dark) style. Relationships with the local cardinal, an aging whore and two profit-hungry male prostitutes veer him into a life of distraction. After killing a man, a harrowing dream helps him to realize the lighter side of his ordained talent and he flees to Naples.

Having seen the light comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile simply won't prepare you for the dark story of Caravaggio's life. A street language permeates the story-line. For example, when Caravaggio is annoyed by an old woman, he asks her, "What's the difference between you and a barrel of shit?" "What?" she responds. "The barrel."

Shit has an important place in the fine arts (an artist in the '70s actually sold tins of his own feces for thousands of dollars a pop), but this play doesn't package it very well. The script rarely tells compelling details of story or plot.

The script may have damned this play in pre-production, but it is hard to tell given the intrusively poor acting. Brian Weese plays the strong-willed master artist Caravaggio as a weak-kneed post-adolescent trying to manfully assert his darker side. It's like watching Quentin Tarantino play Hamlet or Steve Buscemi play Rocky. Kathryn Knapp plays the female lead, Lena - Caravaggio's whore - with a perturbing unfamiliarity with the stage props. As her unrehearsed tinkling with the plastic dinnerware reminds us how fabricated the setting is, so too is her character infused with a plastic dramatic thinness.

The supporting cast speaks other information to the senses. Sean Zackson and Peter Chan play male prostitutes Lucio and Antonio with coyly reserved tenderness. And Charles Prokopp - who played a sterling Gonzalo in City Players' production The Tempest - gives a pondered rendering as the Cardinal. But they are, like the exquisite stage scenery, background remonstrances to the poor script and performance. Caravaggio is a less tasty suite to City Players' promising beginnings.