Savage Arts

What the hell is it with artists, especially the exotic French ones? They like to drink, smoke, have affairs, and paint naked women. That creates a dangerous scenario when an artist moves in next door to a sexually clueless housewife stuck darning socks. Set in New York State during Prohibition and loosely based on the true story of an Indian witchcraft trial, Savage Arts has playwright Sharon Eberhardt playing Margaret, a sheltered young wife with a strict moral code. Eberhardt also plays Margaret's sickly husband; the loose-moraled French artist; and his sultry wife in this one-woman show. Her performance paints a slow and sensual world of attraction and perceived salvation, but this grand seduction isn't earned. It feels more like a naive crush gone wrong. There is fertile ground here for a lustful battle of wills and morals, but Margaret is too quick to shed her clothes for lines like "Fabric is too hard to paint." Her character is fairly unsophisticated, and thus the audience sees the betrayals and twists long before she does, taking away much of the ending's punch. Eberhardt is trying to write a murder mystery tinged with Native American mysticism, but Savage Arts would work much better if it dug deeper into the sexual and intellectual blossoming of a young woman who has seen little of the world.