In 'The Collaboration,' Anthony McCarten’s absorbing new play, Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope take on Warhol and Basquiat
The posters framed it as a fight; a challenge between two heavyweights. At left was Andy Warhol, wearing shiny Everlast boxing gloves, shorts, a black turtleneck, and a vaguely haunted look on his face—he was, by then, a frail 56—his arms crossed like Tutankhamen’s. At his side was Jean-Michel Basquiat, shirtless, impassive, and not yet 25, in the same gloves, shorts, and stance. In other imagery, their gloves are raised, or Warhol lands a blow on Basquiat’s jaw.
The critical response to their project was not warm.
In the end it was less a creative showdown, pitting Pop art’s studied flatness against the barely controlled chaos of neo-expressionism, than the creation, at least for a while, of an unlikely friendship. That’s the subject ofAnthony McCarten’s absorbing new play starring Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope and directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah. After a buzzy run at London’s Young Vic , it begins previews at New York’s Samuel J.
It’s also about fame, race, addiction, police brutality, and, of course, art—what it’s for, who it’s for—spending most of its time in either Warhol’s Factory, or at the loft he loaned to Basquiat on Great Jones Street. Fear is in there, too, at least on Warhol’s end; he hadn’t put paintbrush to canvas in about 20 years when he began working with Basquiat.
Bettany, who has been a mainstay of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2008, lately as the superhero Vision, could understand the feeling: Before the play opened at the Young Vic in February, he hadn’t been onstage since 1998. Yet his queasiness about portraying Warhol had other underpinnings.
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