Art
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
But is it art? That is the question, familiar to students of 20th-century aesthetics, that hangs at the center of the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s 1994 comedy of manners and men. Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) has paid a fortune for a large painting, by a celebrated artist named Antrios, that is almost totally white. His old friend Marc (Bobby Cannavale) is outraged by this purchase, which he considers a grave insult to common sense and, by extension, to his own good influence. Their perpetually flustered common pal Yvan (James Corden), caught in the middle, tries in vain to accommodate them both while retaining their love, as though mommy and daddy were getting a divorce.
Even in 1998, when Art debuted on Broadway, this framework was more than a little passé, rehearsing arguments about modern art that probably peaked around 1965. In the play’s current Broadway mounting, directed by Scott Ellis, those discussions seem even quainter—and all but irrelevant to the seismic gaps that have opened up in recent years. This iteration is ostensibly set in the U.S., so the francs of the original have been exchanged for dollars, but the names and the overall sensibility remain quite French (with a twist of British via Christopher Hampton’s translation). If you squint very hard, you may make out faint suggestions of contemporary American resonance—in Marc’s blustering contempt for elite tastes, for example, or Serge’s dismissal of him as a “nostalgia...