A rising star and a faded scarecrow meet and make effulgent art together in Anthony McCarten’s new play The Collaboration, the latest installment in our insatiable fascination with the art world’s most improbable dynamic duo, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. It’s New York, 1984, and Warhol, once the blasé pontiff of Pop, has gone stale from overexposure, his creative output on cruise control. He’s in need of a transfusion and a fresh kick-start. Into the humdrum pandemonium of his daily routine hurdles Basquiat, a scuffed-up downtown prodigy with energy and ambition to waste. After their first lunch together—as Warhol recorded in his diary—Basquiat hurried home and “within two hours a painting was back, still wet, of him and me together.” Still wet! As if the future couldn’t wait. Theirs was a friendship and partnership where the conversation was conducted with paint, as artist Keith Haring observed, with an extra accompaniment of intimate Polaroids. Directed by Kwami Kwei-Armah, The Collaboration stars Jeremy Pope as Basquiat and Paul Bettany, best known perhaps as Wanda Maximoff’s synthezoid husband Vision, as Warhol—nifty casting, given that Andy was practically animatronic in real life. —James Wolcott