There's a great deal of dramain the world of authentication

Authenticity, attribution, provenance -- these are just the start of the messy issues of the art world.

The world of the theater has recently trained a bright light on these questions. Naomi Iizuka's play ''36 Views," now showing at the Huntington Theatre, involves a dealer whose career, as he tells us in a prologue, was made when he trekked through the wilds of Burma, emerging with a fortune in art and antiques. He revels in the ambiguous ethics and legality of his actions.

In the play, he himself is duped -- or is he? -- by staffers who announce the ''discovery" of an alleged 11th-century ''pillow book," in which Japanese courtesans kept vivid diaries. After the dealer gives the transcript of the pillow book to the brilliant young scholar he fancies -- or does he? -- she touts it as a historic find. The artist tells her story to a journalist, whose scoop has a lasting effect on the careers of the dealer and scholar. Questions of forgery, betrayal, and success in the marketplace of art and ideas hover in the complex tale.

We're never sure where the truth lies in this plot -- as in so much of the art world, where attributions for a painting can bounce back and forth like a tennis ball.

Unfortunately, the crux of ''36 Views" doesn't ring true.

''If a dealer suspected a work wasn't genuine, that would be motivation for not doing a thorough background check," says Anne Rose Kitagawa, a curator of Japanese art at the Harvard Art Museums. A dealer eager for a sale might sacrifice the research.

As for competent scholars, they don't make a splashy announcement of a millennium-old manuscript that hasn't been seen by experts who could verify it, hasn't been sent to a conservation lab to be scrutinized by modern technological means, and hasn't had its provenance traced back as far as possible.

''If someone were to find a previously unknown 11th-century Japanese manuscript, it would be a really big deal," Kitagawa says, adding that in the current calligraphy show she organized for Harvard's Sackler Museum, drawn from the holdings of the distinguished Boston-area collectors Sylvan Barnet and William Burto, there are fragments of a late 11th- or early 12th-century poetry anthology and part of a diary from the 13th century, and that these are rare finds. If a complete ''pillow book" came on the market, it would be ''astonishing," she says.

Whether on a proscenium stage or in a museum, the subject of attribution is the stuff of drama. ''36 Views" treats it rather awkwardly, with too many improbable twists to keep track of. The cleverest of all plays on the theme, to my mind, is Alan Bennett's 1988 ''A Question of Attribution," in which Anthony Blunt -- spy, art historian, and erstwhile adviser to Queen Elizabeth II -- converses with Her Majesty about a Titian triple portrait that he says is not a ''fake" but ''wrongly attributed."

Another convincing play on a similar subject is Simon Gray's ''The Old Masters," which premiered in London last summer. Unlike ''36 Views," it features real characters: the art historian Bernard Berenson and the dealer Joseph Duveen. The drama centers on Duveen's 1937 visit to Berenson at the connoisseur's Villa I Tatti in the hills outside Florence. Duveen's mission: to get Berenson to change an attribution on a painting from Titian to Giorgione, whose works are rarer and worth more. Andrew Mellon, a client of Duveen's, wanted a Giorgione.

Berenson also worked for Isabella Stewart Gardner, helping her form a collection for her palazzo on the Fenway, now the Gardner museum. ''He sold her misattributed works," says Gardner curator Alan Chong, ''but probably not deliberately."

''There's a portrait she bought as a Titian, even though Berenson told her it wasn't," Chong adds. ''It's by Sofonisba Anguissola. It was Gardner herself who made the misattribution." The collector's motto, after all, was ''C'est mon plaisir" (''It is my pleasure").

Professionals who aren't in the attribution business for their own ''plaisir" do a certain amount of policing in the art world. The scholars of the Rembrandt Research Project, for instance, have for more than two decades roamed the world deciding which ''Rembrandts" are real. When they got to Boston in the early 1980s, they demoted a pair of portraits in the Museum of Fine Arts to ''workshop of Rembrandt." The MFA's curators, and most other authorities, disagree. Besides, notes MFA curator Frederick Ilchman, the RRP has on many occasions reversed its own initial findings.

And there are instances when a passionate public ignores the experts' view. The most famous recent case is ''The Polish Rider" in New York's Frick Museum, long billed as a Rembrandt, now thought by some scholars to be by William Drost (whose reputation has skyrocketed on the strength of that opinion).

To those whose hearts skip a beat when gazing at the dashing image, it doesn't matter that the RRP doesn't believe it's the real thing. It could have been painted by the conservator in ''36 Views" for all they care. They're in love.

Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs on Wednesdays.