Keith Bunin is the author of The Credeaux Canvas, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. His other plays include The Principality of Sorrows, The King of Clocks, A Joke and The World Over. Keith has written two screenplays for Killer Films. Keith has also been published in American Film Magazine and on the web at McSweeney’s. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Jamie (Brian Hoffman) is the son of a recently deceased art dealer. He is blatantly left out of his father's will, which leads Jamie to orchestrate an art forgery swindle as a way of raising his self-image and the level of his bank account. He involves Amelia (Aubrey Shavvon), who wants to be a singer but is currently a waitress, and Winston (Leif A. Gilbertson), a devoted art student who has a talent for painting in the manner of Jean Paul Credeaux, an obscure French painter. Tess (Kimberly Daniel), a wealthy art collector, is the targeted dupe in Jamie’s swindle. But the real study here involves the search by Jamie, Amelia, and Winston for fulfillment of their hearts' desires, in relationships and in art.

“Keith Bunin has written a perceptive, witty, bittersweet new play about art: its practitioners, purchasers, and parasites; and about the heart: its convolutions, connivances, and convulsions” said New York magazine theatre critic John Simon, naming the play one of the Best Plays of 2001. Ben Brantley, in his New York Times review, described the play and its author in glowing terms: “Mr. Bunin brings us to this scene with a deft, remarkably assured control of complicated elements of plot, character and theme…What’s more, it is achieved with a well-tuned ear for archly self-conscious speech and without the creak of exposition common to young playwrights.” Clive Barnes of the New York Post called The Credeaux Canvas “A wonderful play about art, life, forgery and inspiration.” Also naming the play among the year’s TOP TEN.

“I’d written The Credeaux Canvas essentially about people in their 20’s and I had in mind that that’s who I was writing to. And then at Playwrights Horizons, the subscribers were essentially much older, and it was fascinating to see how they responded to it, and that they did respond to it. You never end up necessarily getting the audience that you wrote for, so I think you just try to reach whomever you can reach. There’s a Salinger quote: ‘just remember that you were a reader before you were a writer’. So I just think of the thing I would most like to read next or see next, and I write that.”

Aubrey (Amelia) made her New Theatre debut in Hamlet last season (Player Queen, Lady in Waiting). Laif Adam Gilbertson (Winston) and Brian Hoffman (Jamie) both make their New Theatre debuts in this production. Brian appears for the first time in South Florida. Carbonell winner Kimberly Daniel (Tess) is the co-founder of New Theatre, where she has appeared in 27 productions since 1987. She will return next this season in A Town Like Irving. Laif appeared in GableStage earlier this season in The Shape of Thing

The Credeaux Canvas runs February 27 through March 30.
Call for tickets (305) 443 5909.

Febrero 2003