On our way out of the Music Box Theater where the revival of Yasmina Reza’s Art is currently playing, my female theatergoing companion remarked, “It was very funny, but men don’t really talk to each other that way. They don’t discuss their feelings so much.”
James Corden, Neil Patrick Harris,
and Bobby Cannavale in Art.
Credit: Matthew Murphy
“But these are French men, not Americans,” I replied. “Ooooh,” she said. My friend may have correct in her assessment. The comedy in Reza’s easy, tightly-constructed wind-up toy of a play derives from the rapid-fire interchanges between a trio of longtime pals and the conflicting emotions which arise from the purchase of a ludicrously expensive, seemingly meaningless painting by one of them. Their initial reactions of wounded pride on the part of the purchaser and shock and bewilderment from the other two soon give way to long-buried resentments and everyone’s entrails are metaphorically spilled all over the stage. American males usually keep their guts and feelings safely bottled up (maybe Europeans are generally more expressive), and that’s what makes the play so funny: seeing the characters test the limits of their friendship and letting their emotions explode after holding them down for a hour before the final 30 minutes. The play doesn’t have anything particularly insightful to say about art or elitist culture itself, but this slick, sleek, well-polished production is a pleasurable diversion.
Reza’s sharp and amusing play in Christopher Hampton’s idiomatic and highly accessible English translation is given a fast, shiny staging by Scott Ellis and provides a rigorous acting workout for its three stars, Bobby Cannavale, James Corden and Neil Patrick Harris. After smash-hit runs in Paris and London, Art opened on Broadway in 1998, winning the Tony Award for Best Play and running 600 performances, a respectable run for a non-musical. The slim play is not quite as deep or daring as Reza’s other Tony-winning work God of Carnage which borrows a bit from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? But Art is riotously funny, puts across a few noncontroversial positions about art (it’s all in the eye of the beholder), and will keep you amused for an hour and a half.
