Note: This review is of the 2016 production of ‘Deal With the Dragon.’ For info about the 2022 production at the Magic Theatre, see here.
Kevin Rolston’s one-man show, Deal with the Dragon, doesn’t start big. It just kind of unfurls in front of you. There are no explanations or big scenes, and nothing that lets you easily gauge the scope and ambition of this strange, satisfying tale of emotional and spiritual ineptitude.
The play begins with art criticism of the most debased kind, as Brenn (Rolston), suave and of Germanic origin, finishes writing a Yelp review of one of those museum extravaganzas that tours the world — Treasures of the Louvre. Rolston’s acting and M. Graham Smith’s direction are almost non-committal at this point. There’s a whiff of parody, of euro-aesthetes who find America both delightful and repulsive. Yet right from the start, you can sense the show resisting what it sets up. As if it were necessary for us to feel the caricature and reject it at the same time.
We soon find out that Brenn is also another recognizable type: the artist’s caretaker. He is the financial and emotional support for Hunter (Rolston again), a needy painter struggling to finish his masterwork and one of two finalists for a prestigious museum show. Brenn feeds Hunter fresh doughnuts, threatens his threatening bill collectors, and genuflects before his talent.
He’s the unsung hero of another man’s ambition, a rather common trope in the tortured artist genre. Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo might be the best examples of the idiom and John Logan’s preposterous take on Rothko, Red, the worst. There are scores of other dramas that follow these lines and Rolston knows that. And he knows that we know, and even as he gives us that story in full bloom, it turns out to be far from the story that we’re going to get.