It's a happy match of subject and venue to present Y York's "Framed" at The ARTS at Marks Garage.

The tiny performance space at the rear of the gallery boasts a new small proscenium stage and raked audience seating for this premiere production, and York's play is not only about art and artists, it uses original paintings in its set design to help identify scenes and underscore theme.

The background art can be literal, like Gary Park's stained glass window for a church scene, or suggestive, like Aaron Padilla's close-up of a door lock for the older couple's home.

Unfortunately, the script, directed by Mark Lutwak (who with York was formerly affiliated with the Honolulu Theatre for Youth), becomes interesting only in its final moments, when each character makes a sudden about-face.

York is too good a playwright to spring a climactic reversal without salting the script with enough clues to make it plausible. But the play's two acts work like a long, slow walk in the park, leading to a sudden drop over the edge of a cliff.

"Framed" follows two couples. The older pair are Nick and Joanie. The youngsters are Jake and May. Act One closes without a clear indication of where they are headed. Will they develop a "Virginia Woolf" relationship? Would it be more dynamic — as many have suggested of Albee's play — if these were same-sex couples?

Joanie (Margaret Jones) is a mediocre painter and teacher. Husband Nick (Keith Kashiwada) is a shady businessman with a back-room gambling operation and sinister overtones. But he worships his wife and secretly buys her art to boost her morale.

May (Ginger Gohier) takes art lessons from Joanie so that she can learn enough to paint a memory portrait of her dead mother. Jake (Jason Kanda) is a social-climbing grease monkey who works on Nick's expensive car and stalks him in search of a role model.

In a series of short, cryptic scenes liberally laced with humor, May's emotional and undisciplined work immediately begins to outshine that of her teacher. Not surprisingly, Joanie begins to pass May's work off as her own while scolding her about the need for technique and craft: "There is no other way to say it. This is just crap."

Well, there always is another way to say it, but the hardest task is usually deciding what it is one wants to say. And "Framed" is more than a comedy about manipulation with a comeuppance ending.

The title offers a clue. Contemporary art canvases are not framed and merge with the larger context of the wall. Framed art is a sentimental landscape "from your grandmother's living room."

So perhaps "Framed" is a study in people's personal "frames" — how they're made and how they're changed.

That would keep the play solidly in the context of portrait art. But one wishes it were less of a still life.