A man walks into a museum and begins to paint over a valuable art work. Turns out he's the French symbolist painter Pierre Bonnard, who has a "fresh idea" for his own painting and wishes to revise it. This is the starting point for Israel Horowitz's uneven new play, The Secret of Mme. Bonnard's Bath, which is the inaugural production of the New York Playwrights Lab. While the show wrestles with some intriguing concepts including intellectual property, the consequences of sexual freedom, and artistic inspiration, it only rarely stirs the emotions.

Cutting forwards and backwards in time, the work not only shows excerpts from various points in the life of Bonnard (John Shea), but also modern-[...]