Michael Healey's new play, The Innocent Eye Test, which opened Thursday at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg and arrives next month at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, has a curious pedigree. The story is that Healey, who wrote The Drawer Boy, the most successful English-language play in history, happened to bump into theatre impresario David Mirvish. "I'd like you to write a comedy about sex and money," Mirvish said. "I'll hire you to write an outline and then we'll decide whether to commission it."
So Healey drafted a pitch document, and showed up a few months later with a book of paintings by contemporary American artist Mark Tansey. Mirvish, a savvy modern art dealer in his former life and still an avid collector, did not know Tansey's work, but was fascinated. Partly because, to the sex and money themes, Healey had added the story about a modern art dealer caught in unenviable circumstances. "He seems to have remembered every conversation we've ever had," Mirvish says.
The specific Tansey painting Healey had in mind was a monochromatic oil on canvas work called The Innocent Eye Test, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The picture shows a group of men recording a cow's reaction to a life-sized painting by 17th-century Dutch artist Paulus Potter, which includes two cows in a pastoral landscape. All the men wear glasses, except one man. He wields a mop, probably in anticipation of certain bovine habits.
Healey's made-to-order script is a Feydeau-esque farce (many mistaken identities, doors banging open and shut), set in a jet-set hotel in Tuscany. Terrorists are trying to buy weapons-grade plutonium, while someone else is trying to sell art. The play, starring Tom McCamus and directed by Christopher Newton, is reviewed on this page.