Franz Kline's Nephew Wrote A Play About Franz Kline...and an artist gets his wings

"A Part of the Noise", an inebriated romp starring Franz Kline and that merry band of American Abstract Expressionists

“I only met my uncle once,” said Carl Kline, about the celebrated Abstract Expressionist painter, Franz Kline. “He stopped by the house. It was a quick, cursory thing and it was one of those, ‘Hi, it’s nice to meet you’ kind of things. I was 11 when he died. But I would hear my father’s phone conversations with him. He and my father were close and they would talk on the phone a lot. I knew my uncle was a famous painter.”

Kline felt his uncle wasn’t getting, as he calls it, “enough ink”, compared to some of the other painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Mark Rothko—deservedly so, I noted that he was quick to say—so to rectify that, he wrote A Part of the Noise, a play about his uncle set during the last years and a key point in the painter’s life.

A reading of the play will be held this Sunday, August 11 at 7:00 PM at The Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford Street, in Provincetown as part of FORUM 24, which celebrates the 75th anniversary of Forum 49.

In the summer of 1949, Provincetown avant-garde artists—abstract expressionist painters, musicians, poets, architects, and psychoanalysts—gathered together to answer the question,“What is Art?” For 60 cents you could have listened to James Joyce and T.S Eliott reading their poetry. Heady times.

I’m not sure Carl is right when he says, “not enough ink” is the problem surrounding his uncle’s acclaim. Plenty has been written about Kline and all the AbEx painters for that matter, although more about the men than the women, but still I think the real problem is that people don’t know painters in general. I’m not talking about in places like New York or Boston or Provincetown. There are a lot of smarty pants in those cities and towns.

But out there in what are disparagingly and in my mind unfairly called the flyover states, there are a lot of people who could name every starting quarterback in the NFL, including their height and weight and whether they throw the ball left-handed or right, but after Picasso, Rembrandt, da Vinci, and maybe Van Gogh, they’d be stumped. They know the Mona Lisa and Rodin’s The Thinker, but that’s about it.

What they would be familiar with is the style of painting, which upon viewing would be typically followed up with the retort, “my three-year-old could do that.” And really, who can blame them? You’d have to understand at least the basics that the American Abstract Expressionists were responding to the horrors unleashed during WW II—the concentration camps, the dropping of two atomic bombs—so that pretty pictures of landscapes and realistic pictures of people just weren’t going to cut it any more than it did for the Dadaists after WW I. But how are they supposed to know that? Where are they going to learn that?

Which is why it is so cool that Kline wrote this, yes, very delightful play about his uncle, Franz, and included a host of the characters from that time including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, Robert Motherwell (the part will be read by Lise Motherwell, the painter’s actual daughter), and the gallerist Sydney Janis, who in this version is depicted just this side of Snidely Whiplash.

So dear reader, I am going to go off on a tiny tangent here, and say if I’m to continue publishing ‘from the studio’ and you are going to continue to go along for the ride, there will be times when I’ll need to let my hair down a touch, and we’ll need to get to know each other just a little better.

This is one of those times.

Right now I have to tell you that I think I’ve seen Woodie Allen’s Midnight in Paris at least 35, if not more times. If you’re not familiar with the film, Owen Wilson goes back in time to the 1920s and interacts with the likes of Hemingway, F. and Zelda Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein.

When I get really depressed I watch scenes from the film on YouTube to cheer myself up, my favorite being Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali.

Carl Kline’s play reminds me very much of that film. One of the reasons I like watching Allen’s film is because the actors clearly had a ball playing these famous characters.

Kline particularly has given his main characters enough meat so that the actors have plenty to sink their teeth into, especially Kline and Kline’s wife, Elizabeth, who spent much of her life in mental institutions and whom Franz never abandoned. John, the bartender at the Cedar Tavern, the real-life hangout of the AbEx painters, is a combination of Freddy in Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Sam Malone in Cheers, gives the other characters support, advice, and a kick in the pants when needed with his New Yawkese patter (Fine, tanks.  Now dat dat’s over, ya mind tellin’ me what’s goin’ on?) And Artie Mendelbaum, the twenty-five-year-old writer and critic for The Artist Magazine, who is trying to figure it all out. Don’t confuse him with the artist, Arie Mandelbaum, like I did at first; Artie is a product of the playwright’s imagination.

Since he didn’t know his uncle, Kline relied on everything he could get his hands on from that era. “I read everything I could find whether it was a book about him, or an article written by Elaine de Kooning,” Kline said. True events like Pollock and Kline wrestling in the Cedar Tavern and Kline’s habit of listening to Wagner in the studio are mixed in with Kline’s imagination drumming up raucous proclamations and high jinks in the bar. At first I felt the dialogue in the bar was a bit flowery and melodramatic, but then I realized, yeah, this is what a bunch of drunken artists would sound like.

The story starts at a key moment in Kline’s career. It’s 1959 and he was already famous for his large, black and white abstractions, and he is preparing for a show at Sidney Janis’s gallery and was going to include a couple of newer works that included color. Janis—true story—was adamant that Kline only include his black and white work, because that was what the public was familiar with, and that’s what the public would buy. A standoff occurs—commerce vs. art/gallerist vs. artist—and the play is off and running.

Even though the script will be read to a crowd that’s likely to be very familiar with the players and events, every time this script is read or performed, if someone learns a little bit more about art history and Franz Kline, Franz Kline will be a little closer to getting his wings.

There are a lot of moving parts and details to the reading, and people who are making this happen. It’s being produced by Forum 49, Provincetown Art Gallery Association, Berta Walker, Berta Walker Gallery, and Grace Hopkins. Hopkins’ father, the painter Bud Hopkins, was initially brought to Provincetown by Kline, and her mother, the art historian, April Kingsley, wrote about Kline. Kingsley’s book, The Turning Point, is one of the definitive reads on that time. The Helltown Players are doing the actual reading, with Lynda Sturner directing, and I’m sure Jim Dalglish has every one of this ten fingers in this event.

Here are the details, and more information is on the Helltown Players site.

Sunday, August 11 at 7:00 p.m.

Tickets: $40 Reading

$80 Reading + Reception at Berta Walker Gallery

Provincetown Theatre

238 Bradford Street, Provincetown, MA.

Co-produced with Provincetown Art Gallery Association and Forum 24.