“The Institute of Contemporary Art’s (ICA) latest exhibition, ‘The World as a Stage,’ opens with a most fitting visual prologue. Towering over viewers upon their entrance, Rita McBride’s ‘Arena’ transforms the gallery into a theater for the modern art below. Inside the curve of the delicately skeletal set of amphitheater seating, museum patrons interacting with art displace ordinary theater performance on the imagined stage. Taken at face value, ‘Arena’ is a piece of art that makes the life around it into theater. However, the artistic possibilities it foreshadows are undermined by the disparate and fragmentary ways that ‘The World as a Stage,’ which will be on display from Feb. 1 through April 27, offers towards understanding its uniting concept.”