Three Trees: Alberto Giacometti’s Art as Theatre and History

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Playwright Alvin Eng and Art Historian Laurie Wilson will discuss Eng’s play, “Three Trees,” a historical drama that explores the unique relationship between 20th century Parisian artist, Alberto Giacometti, and his muse/model, Japanese Existential Philosopher, Isaku Yanaihara. The Pan Asian Repertory Theatre will present the World Premiere of this play at the West End Theare, NYC, March 23 – April 14, 2013. (www.panasianrep.org/three_trees.shtml)

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During the 1950s, Alberto created many portraits of Isaku. For many consecutive summers, Alberto flew Isaku from Tokyo to Paris to continue their sessions. Still, the artist felt he could never fully capture the philosopher’s essence. A deep, complicated love, through art, grew. This love became an obsession that upended everything and everyone in its path. Isaku was forever changed. Alberto’s intimate, insular life with his wife Annette and brother Diego was also never the same.

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“Three Trees” is the first of Eng’s Portrait Plays cycle of historical dramas about artists and portraiture. As such, the play also dramatizes the premise of a portrait’s spiritual ownership. When we become enraptured by a portrait, are we under the spell of the artist or model?

Author Bio

Presented By:

Alvin Eng is a native NYC playwright, performer and educator. His plays and performances have been seen Off-Broadway, throughout the U.S., as well as in Paris, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China. His memoir, Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond, was published in May 2022 by Fordham University Press. Eng is the author and editor of the oral history/play anthology, Tokens? The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage. No Passport Press recently published Three Trees, the first of his Portrait Plays series of historical dramas about artists. He was awarded a 2022 LMCC Creative Engagement grant for a “Hong Kong Handover: 25 Years Later” symposium in conjunction with his acoustic punk raconteur solo show, Here Comes Johnny Yen Again (or How I Kicked Punk).


Presented By:

Laurie Wilson earned her undergraduate degree in art history from Wellesley College, her master¹s degree in Fine Arts and Fine Arts Education from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Art History from City University of New York. She received psychoanalytic training at The NYU Psychoanalytic Institute where she is on the faculty as Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Psychoanalytic Institute affiliated with NYU Medical Center and practices in New York City. She directed the Graduate Art Therapy Program at New York University for twenty-three years and is Professor Emerita there. She has published extensively in three fields – art therapy, art history, psychoanalysis and art therapy. Her book Alberto Giacometti: Myth Magic and the Man was published by Yale University Press in 2003. She is currently completing a biography of Louise Nevelson.