What we know about Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio was that he founded the 17th-century iconographic style now dubbed Mannerist, depicting his mostly religious subjects with a disturbing vigor and sensuality heightened by dramatic (and often wholly unrealistic) contrasts of light and darkness. It is also a matter of public record that he was given to drinking, brawling and fornicating with both men and women - chiefly, the commoners that hired to be his models - and going to great lengths to achieve his shocking visual effects. (He is said to have once brought an exhumed corpse into his studio to pose as the yet-unrevived Lazarus, holding the alarmed surrogate mourners captive until the painting was finished.)
The publicity for this production (subtitled "A Study In Shadow") describes Chiaroscuro as an "erotic thriller" - and, indeed, if we didn't know what we know about this particular artist and his methods, its speculative premise might have been reduced to a hackneyed bondage-fantasy, its structure to abreactive therapy and its ironic final twist to a schadenfreudische joke. But neither author Kenneth N. Kurtz, director Rachel Edwards Harvith, nor actors Michael Sherwin and Kevin Stevens ever condescend to their material, instead immersing themselves in the conceit of the extreme tactics necessary to the creative process - its goal, in this case, a study of Greek mythology's Marsyas the satyr.
Thus we are left to decide, each according to our individual imaginations, whether the dynamic proposed by the characters is truly that of a dedicated, if eccentric, craftsman faced with an assistant who must be coaxed into the appropriate postures, or a sexual charade in which one, or both, of these men voluntarily participates - and if the latter, how aware of the game is each one, and at what moment.
It is to the credit of the company assembled for this Bailiwick Repertory Pride series production that we rarely think about the multiplicity of narrative dimensions inherent in Kurtz' ostensibly superficial scenario, so dazzled are we by the lush sensory images with which we are inundated - breathtaking stage pictures not only invoking the motifs that have made Caravaggio one of the most widely-imitated of European artists, but echoing the play's themes of deceptive impressions, hidden agendas, and the seductive mystery necessary to the achievement of great art. Humble erotic thrillers, too.
