Your friend buys a grotesquely expensive painting that you hate. It’s got nothing to do with you –  I’m OK, you’re OK, right?

Not so in Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” in which the angst-ridden Marc disintegrates after learning that one of his oldest friends, Serge, has paid 200,000 francs for an all-white painting.

“It’s about art, and it’s about value. And then what happens when our values collide,” Kate Carruthers said of the Tony Award-winning play, which opens under her direction tonight at Bainbridge Performing Arts.

In Reza’s script, Marc, Serge and Yvan have been friends for 15 years. In Carruthers’ production, the trio has been intact for a quarter century.

She made the choice practically, to accommodate actors John Ellis, Tell Schreiber and Ron Ford. The by-product is that knowing these three have circled each other for so long makes the play’s sometimes hysterical, sometimes pathos-ridden examination of self and friendship all the more desperate.

Does an uncharacteristic move by someone you thought you knew necessarily call everything into question? For Marc, the answer is yes.

“I love Serge, and I can’t love the Serge who would buy this painting,” Marc says.

Serge, meanwhile, is proud of his own gutsy foray into patronage and shocked not by Marc’s dislike for the painting, but by his virulent insistence on calling it

“s– –t.” Besides, he doesn’t even think the painting is white.

“Marc is hung up with white because that’s his limit,” Serge says.

Then there is Yvan – the fretful, nebbishy go-between who’s working out serious mother issues as he tries to absorb the reality of having settled for a mediocre life.

From the blocking to the spare, angled set, Carruthers’ production emphasizes the fraught and sometimes very, very funny nature of triangulation, perfect in form but disastrous in relationships.

And it’s Yvan, Carruthers points out, who delivers the play’s key question, which tellingly was handed to him by his shrink and which is so mind-bending that he had to write it down. It’s about I, and you, and whether I am you, and who you and I are, and so on, a hilarious you-me conundrum that Carruthers translates:

“Are you my friend because of my perception, or because of who you are?”

Bainbridge, Carruthers observed, is a community that historically has valued and continues to regard the arts as a community asset. Therefore, one could presume that art wouldn’t join the ranks of religion and politics as taboo topics.

Not necessarily, Carruthers said. And it will be fun this evening to observe cocktail conversation about the paintings commissioned by local artists, now hanging in the BPA lobby.

The price point is considerably lower than 200,000 francs, but still. They’re all white. And you never know what’s going to trip someone’s trigger.

“It’s safe to talk about art with people you agree with, but it’s not safe to talk about art with people you don’t agree with,” Carruthers said.

“Art” runs April 10-19 at BPA. Tickets/showtimes: bainbridgeperformingarts.org.