Lauren Gunderson theatricalizes the story of German painter Rudolf Bauer and the inauspicious end of his career at 59E59 Theaters.

“Order and disorder. That’s all we have.” Lauren Gunderson opens the earnest floodgates of Bauer, her tribute to the tortured 20th-century German painter Rudolf Bauer, with a subtle nod to Stephen Sondheim’s fellow-canvas-inspired Sunday in the Park With George. A pioneer in the field of “non-objective” (i.e. abstract) art, Gunderson’s work of historical fiction tackles the complex emotions and motivations behind Bauer’s disappearance from the art scene in the early 1940s. Fluctuating between a sleepy living-room drama and an incongruously avant-garde display, Gunderson lands on a few genuinely intriguing moments — though to find them you have to weed through these alternating spurts of lifeless order and overwhelming disorder. We meet our title character (a stoney Sherman Howard) upon his dramatically morose entrance into the artist’s long-abandoned studio. Filled with dusty crates and a tarp-covered aisle, director and designer Bill English has created a sparse environment, appropriately absent of any creative life. Micah J. Stieglitz’s projections, consequently, become all the more captivating as they periodically transport Bauer back to his days of inspiration. While the reasons for his artistic dry spell remain unclear for a painstakingly extended portion of the play, the opening scene between the ex-painter and his wife (and former maid) Louise (played with a nurturing, though slightly flimsy hand by Susi Damilano) suggests that their impending visitor is at the core of the issue.