Entertainment

Serious-minded but dull ‘Three Trees’ looks at relationship between Giacometti and one of his models

Fittingly for a show about art, “Three Trees” has the speed and intensity of drying paint.

Alvin Eng’s new play centers on the intense bond between the painter/sculptor Alberto Giacometti (Jean-Pierre Stewart) and Japanese philosophy professor Isaku Yanaihara (Marcus Ho) in late-1950s Paris. Get your mind out of the gutter: Giacometti was driven to creative heights by the scholar, who could stay still and pose, fully clothed, for hours on end.

In that he was not unlike the audience sitting through this serious-minded but dull Pan Asian Repertory production. The most entertaining bit is the woolly wig that somehow landed on top of poor Stewart’s head.

The Broadway play “Red,” about Mark Rothko, was far from perfect, but at least it gave us an idea of what it means to be possessed by a creative drive.

Yanaihara specialized in Existentialism, which was all the rage at that time — he hung out with intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and translated their work in Japanese. This at least gave him and Giacometti things to chat about during their long stretches together.

The closeness between Giacometti and Yanaihara threw a wrench in the artist’s relationship with his brother and assistant, Diego (Scott Klavan), as well as in his marriage to the much younger Annette (Leah Cogan) — both had also acted as his models.

“That was as close to pure love as I will ever know,” Yanaihara reflects after hearing of Giacometti’s death, in 1966, yet Eng never gives a good representation of the chemistry the men supposedly shared.

There isn’t much connection either with Annette, with whom the professor had an affair — interestingly, Cogan and Ho have tall, slender bodies that evoke Giacometti’s trademark elongated figures.

Giacometti was fully aware of the situation but kept himself busy with work, drink and brothels. You get away with a lot when you’re a genius. Meanwhile, Eng is unsure of what to do with Diego, so that fourth wheel just skulks around.

Asides from a couple of scenes in a cafe, the show is set in Giacometti’s studio, adorned with his sketches, paintings and sculptures. Unfortunately this doesn’t encourage flights of inspiration in the dialogue. “Alberto is right,” Annette tells Yainahara in one of their plodding exchanges, “only through art can there be legacy.”

A trip to a museum would be fresher than these “deep thoughts.”