Clashing Holds on Renaissance Art History David Edgar’s ‘Pentecost,’ Revived by PTP/NYC
Alexis SoloskiJuly 18, 2014: What if the Renaissance began earlier and elsewhere? That audacious question kindles David Edgar’s Pentecost, a 1994 play revived by PTP/NYC. No less resonant now than when it had its premiere, the drama is a testament to Mr. Edgar’s literary skill and a rebuke to the political climate in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Pentecost is set somewhere in the Balkans inside a church that has also served as a mosque, a prison, a warehouse and a secular museum. But Gabriella Pecs (Tosca Giustini), an impetuous curator at the local museum, believes she has made a major discovery beneath the soot-grimed brick. As she explains to Oliver Davenport (Jonathan Tindle), a skeptical British art historian, she’s found a fresco in one-point perspective that possibly antedates those of Giotto, suggesting that early modernism kicked off a century earlier and in a more easterly direction than the textbooks claim. Quickly the fresco becomes a point of contention among priests, politicians and scholars. Everyone wants to lay claim to it, with the possible exception of Leo Katz (Alex Draper), an American academic who wants to prove it actually isn’t so old or so important. But in the play’s second half these art-historical hypotheticals give way to more brutal realities when a group of asylum seekers barricade themselves in the church and take the art experts hostage.
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