My wife and I consider ourselves very fortunate. Since 1997, we’ve spent one week each year in New York, in “The City.” Kitty-corner to Carnegie Hall, two blocks from Central Park, we “encamp” at the Manhattan Club, a stone’s throw from the marquee glow of Broadway’s theatre district.

Within walking distance, an array of ever-alluring restaurants, museums, and art galleries beckon us. But we’re especially drawn to the plays on Broadway, often hungrily devouring two a day: an afternoon matinee, topped off with an evening performance. For us, it’s the equivalent of dying and going to heaven.

Recently, we saw Art, a play whose premise centers on three sophisticated, middle-aged friends who descend hell-ward in a bitter fight that tears the otherwise resilient fabric of their friendship. The trio’s scorching verbal combat ignites when one of them acquires a “work of art” consisting of a contentless, blank-white canvas, which he purchased for the profligate sum of 300,000 dollars!

Beyond baffled by this purchase, one of the friends raged, “It’s incumbent upon the two of us, the sane, to restore sanity to our beguiled friend and connoisseur of non-art!” As the three waged war over what constitutes art, we, the audience, in stark contrast, laughed uproariously at the go-nowhere folly of their torrential fighting.

Soon, emotionally spent and spun out in a wasteland of irresolution, the three combatants finally lay down their arms as the play resolves in an awkward but peace-restoring truce that tacitly acknowledges the priority of their friendship over the futility of fighting over who is right or wrong.

When the performance ended, we shot to our feet in a standing ovation. And as my hands turned red from vigorous........

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