Paint It ‘Black’ : Despite its reach for situational novelty, Kenneth Robins’ play about an artist’s struggle to survive is a rich, dark comedy.

What must an artist do to sell his work in the gun-shy post-recession art world? Drop dead?

Just about. In his funny but flawed “Black Box” at the Odyssey, Kenneth Robins explores the lengths to which artists will go to survive in the modern marketplace.

A hot commodity during the speculative frenzy of the 1980s, painter Louis Fury (Arye Gross) watched his career collapse in the art crash. Penniless, reduced to living with relatives, Louis is now frantically trying to stage a comeback, with the help of his neurotic wife, Renee (Jeanie Hackett).

Hope dawns when Louis wrangles a show in Pittsburgh through old college buddy, John Holland (William Bumiller), a sexaholic art curator whose suicidal son, Nick (Eric Szmanda), is a constant thorn. When Louis’ opening coincides with a big Steelers football game, the only people who bother to show up are millionaire art collector Andrew Mellon V (Weston Blakesley) and his trophy-wife, Laura (Rhonda Aldrich), who offers Louis a “commission”--painting a color-coordinated banner for an upcoming charity fashion show.

It’s the equivalent of asking Picasso to hand-paint Elvis statuettes for the Franklin Mint. But, as Robins illustrates in his frequently quick-witted satire, artists, with a few high-profile exceptions, are subjected to penitential indignities in our society.

Louis’ sole defense against an unceasing (and hilarious) barrage of humiliation is his talent; Renee’s is her quick wit--formidable weapons when wielded by Gross and Hackett. As played by these two, Louis and Renee could hire out as a poster couple for anomie.

Robins casts his intellectual net wide, and when he does land his point, it’s a beauty. When Louis discovers the tortured Nick’s penchant for self-mutilation, he comments, with a true artist’s eye, “I don’t believe you’re sick. You’re just working in a limited medium.”

Abetted by a crack design team, director David Schweizer makes the most of Robins’ epigrammatic keenness. Peter Golub’s original ,music, Angelo Palazzo’s sound and Sean Sullivan’s costumes are all excellent. Bristling with objects suspended in midair, Lawrence Miller’s set, beautifully lit by Rand Ryan, could be a post-Modernist art installation in and of itself.

Schweizer’s staging is brisk and witty, although it becomes overly broad in reaction to certain of Robins’ plot lapses. The foreshadowing of Louis’ near-death experience is overblown and contrived. Also problematic is the evolution of Louis’ character from gritty urbanite to starry-eyed mystic and back again. A fashion show sequence panders shamelessly for laughs. And a feel-good ending verges on the cheaply sentimental.

However, when he’s not straining for situational novelty, Robins is an intellectually breezy writer whose artist’s-eye view of the absurdities and vagaries of an artist’s life is colorful indeed.

BE THERE

“Black Box,” Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. except Dec. 21 and Jan. 11, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 8. $18.50-$22.50. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.