Dim prospect Naomi Iizuka’s 36 Views isn’t much to look at BY STEVE VINEBERG
	36 Views By Naomi Iizuka. Directed by Evan Yionoulis. Sets designed by Adam Stockhausen. Costumes by Teresa Snider-Stein. Lighting by Chris Parry. With V Craig Heidenreich, Christine Toy Johnson, Brad Heberlee, Jane Cho, Heather Lea Anderson, and MacIntyre Dixon. At the Huntington Theatre Company through April 10.

It’s easy to make Naomi Iizuka’s 36 Views, which is receiving its Boston premiere from the Huntington Theatre Company, sound fascinating and multi-tiered just by summarizing its plot. Art dealer Darius Wheeler (V Craig Heidenreich), who specializes in Asian works and sees himself as a sort of adventurer, is offered access to an 11th-century pillow book, the memoir of an obscure Japanese courtesan. He takes a copy of the manuscript to Setsuko Hearn (Christine Toy Johnson), a beautiful young Asian-studies professor in whom he has a romantic interest, and all her passions — intellectual, ambitious, and erotic — are aroused by his willingness to share it with her. It’s a breakthrough in her field, challenging previously held notions about gender roles in mediæval Japanese society, and it facilitates a breakthrough in their relationship, since she’s previously held him at bay. In truth, however, the pillow book doesn’t exist. Wheeler’s assistant, John Bell (Brad Heberlee), invented it on an unspoken dare to prove to his friend Claire Tsong (Jane Cho), an artist who supports herself doing restoration work, that he has the independence of spirit to perpetrate a ruse against his employer, and Claire, impressed, applied her talents to creating it for him.

The themes of the play are the tension between art and fraud and the supreme importance of perspective in determining the value or even the identity of a work of art. The title comes from a series of Edo-period woodblock paintings by Hokusai that captures Mount Fuji — as Monet later depicted his grainstacks — at different times of the day and in different seasons, as well as from a variety of angles. The way Iizuka toys with the notion of perspective, a way that manifests itself partly in the continual plot twists and partly in the creation of an off-stage character, a reclusive artist who has completed his own variation on Hokusai’s masterwork, is extremely clever. The problem is that 36 Views is merely clever. It’s like an outline for a play that Iizuka hasn’t yet written: she doesn’t actually say anything about these resonant themes beyond making the thinnest and most banal observations. She might just as well have distributed lists of the topics she raises with instructions to the audience: "Talk among yourselves."

No surprise, then, that I never believed for a moment that any of the characters is the person he or she claims to be — artist, art dealer, academic, journalist. (Heather Lea Anderson plays a struggling reporter who sets up an elaborate scheme to expose the illicit side of Wheeler’s business.) They sound like college kids prepping for a final in an introductory art-history course. Everyone on stage spouts clichés like (my favorite) "It’s not about what it looks like. It’s about what it is." The dialogue is in the overwritten-underwritten style contemporary playwrights favor in an effort to emulate David Mamet — everything is said over and over to make it seem heightened, yet there’s no subtext. The play begins with a monologue by Wheeler, an anecdote, possibly worked up, about his experiences finding art treasures in crazy, dangerous parts of the world, and as I listened, my mind ran through the lines like a red pencil, eliminating all the repetitions. It was dismaying to read in Iizuka’s bio that she directs the playwriting program at UC–Santa Barbara.

It’s hard to say what performers ought to do to bring this not-so-fancy talk alive, but under Evan Yionoulis’s direction, the acting is so flatly presentational and self-conscious that it rarely rises much above recitation — an effect that’s underscored by the use of a wooden block, a Japanese percussive instrument, to punctuate significant lines. The exception among the cast is the veteran character actor McIntyre Dixon as Hearn’s mentor, an old-fashioned bow-tie-sporting academic who, as Dixon portrays him, has an unexpected sweetness of spirit. (I suspect Iizuka intends us to find him rather foolish, but Dixon’s interpretation precludes that stock response.) The biggest disappointment is the visual aspect of the production, which you might imagine to be dazzling given the subject matter, the adoption of certain kabuki devices (like the stage hands clad entirely in black), and the fact that the text evokes 11th-century Japan in the excerpts from the manufactured pillow book. The staging is surprisingly blocky and graceless; it lacks fluidity, shimmer, compositional panache. The set designs by Adam Stockhausen are up to the challenge, but Yionoulis doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. It’s a dim piece of direction executed on a dim script.