Paint by numbers Brown’s bewildering 36 Views BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

How appropriate that 36 Views (through October 23) is about art forgery. Despite the best efforts on stage and snazzy production design by Brown University Theater and Sock & Buskin, Naomi Iizuka’s play itself can’t very well conceal its shoddy workmanship.

Like its central character, successful art dealer Darius Wheeler (Jon Magaziner), the play maintains a surface charm. Michael McGarty’s set design is quietly elegant, with open wooden partitions sliding across the stage like Japanese rice paper doors and convincing-enough Far Eastern art here and there. Mainly we are in Wheeler’s elegantly simple apartment, above his art gallery.

As a dealer, he has a dubious reputation, which he inflates in an opening monologue. He is trying to impress Setsuko Hearn (Zoë Chao), a beautiful young professor of East Asian literature, with an Indiana Jones anecdote of derring-do. Their mating dance continues through the play, as she wonders whether his declarations of sincerity are mere sham.

She’s not perplexed alone. The play’s title refers to a series of 19th-century woodblock prints in which Katsushika Hokusai depicted Mt. Fuji from numerous perspectives. Likewise, the characters here eventually have to consider that views they thought were solid are actually illusory. Sometimes they are fooled by others, sometimes by themselves, usually by both.

Fair premise, not to mention an unassailable one. (Anyone besides religious fundamentalists want to make a case for the infallibility of belief?) The trick for a playwright is to sail past the obvious; 36 Views founders there.

Others here engage in less romantic ambiguities. Wheeler’s brilliant, multilingual assistant, John Bell (Steven Levenson), is friends with Claire Tsong (Mikiko Akemi Thelwell), an art restorer whom the dealer occasionally employs. Claire successfully tempts John to test the astuteness of his boss by pretending that some fiction he has been writing is an actual historical find. The discovery of this "pillow book," purportedly written by an 11th-century Japanese courtesan, becomes a public sensation. Since it is in Claire’s field of expertise, she is drawn in, as well as her academic superior, the fatuously enthusiastic Owen Matthiassen (Dan Hernandez).

In a little variation on the theme of schemes, another character is added. Elizabeth Newman-Orr (Alexandra Panzer) barges in on Wheeler and says she represents people who would pay him well to smuggle from Japan a work that inconveniently happens to be a national treasure. Is she who she says she is? Does he believe her? Will we care?

The caring part is crucial here. As anyone knows who loved the first Star Wars movie but sneered at the last ones, we can put up with a certain amount of shaky plot logic if we believe in the characters. In 36 Views, Wheeler’s object of seduction accurately sums up the problem that both she and we have with him. How can I believe you, Hearn says, if I don’t know you at all?

Reverse that equation and you have the problem with the play. If we don’t believe what’s happening, we can’t believe these people. What sort of forgers handle their bogus documents without gloves? How can we swallow that a character suspicious of Wheeler is swayed because "he sounds truthful"? And, fundamentally, careless writing breaks off our empathy in some exchanges. For just one example, although a furious Hearn explodes at Wheeler for presuming to know what she is thinking, that he has been using her to certify his forgery, she has already made those thoughts quite explicit.

The same sort of implausibilities crop up with the literary forgery itself, which doesn’t even pass the "well, maybe" test. Why is Wheeler letting his assistant be the only one to deal with the supposed owner of the manuscript when millions of dollars are involved? How in the world could Hearn and her colleague put their reputations behind the legitimacy of the manuscript without careful examination? (Matthiassen’s after-the-fact breast-beating about not having done so is no explanation.)

The actors here do their best to rescue their characters from their abandonment by the playwright. Some manage to give some depth to these people by conveying internal tugs of war — especially Levenson as the assistant and occasionally Chao as Hearn. But 36 Views, directed by Lowry Marshall, badly needed a dramaturg early on in its writing. To compose the play with 36 scenes is clever but by itself makes for a wobbly structure when some of these building blocks are so flimsy.