In comic, cutting 'ART' at APT, friendships reach a crossroads

Lindsay Christians, The Cap Times

In her 2024 essay for The New Yorker, “The Trouble with Friends,” Weike Wang considers whether three is stronger than two.

“According to the sociology of group dynamics, a triad is more stable than a dyad because one member can act as a mediator,” she writes. She doesn’t believe it — “in a triad, two people are always closer and risk icing out the third” — but that’s not her real worry.

“Unlike family, a friendship can be deprioritized. My mother will always be my mother, and I will always have space for her, but that’s not how it works with friends. I can choose to take my heart away.”

In Yasmina Reza’s 1998 French comedy “Art,” onstage indoors at American Players Theatre through Sept. 28, sinkholes beneath a decades-long friendship emerge in the form of an eye-wateringly expensive, four-by-five foot painting of what looks like empty white space.

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