“Art” is not about art, and it’s not really about friendship. If it’s about anything at all, the Broadway revival of Yasmina Reza’s 30-year-old play is about the celebrity of Bobby Cannavale, James Corden and Neil Patrick Harris, who star as longtime friends who come to blows over an expensive all-white painting.
All three actors are familiar faces on TV, each with enough fans apparently willing to pay a top ticket price upwards of $500, judging by the box office grosses in the three weeks since the production opened at Broadway’s Music Box Theater, and by the deafening entrance applause that greeted each of them one by one at the matinee I attended.
All three are also experienced stage actors, deft at generating laughs from a squabble that has no credible stakes, and projecting a feeling of camaraderie among characters who seem to share nothing in common, which even the characters themselves eventually acknowledge.
Harris portrays Serge, a dermatologist who has spent $300,000 to buy a painting by a (fictional) artist named Antrios. This infuriates Marc (Cannavale), an aeronautical engineer, which of course annoys Serge. Their mutual friend Yvan (Corden), a sales agent for a stationery company, tries to mediate. For much of the play, Marc just ridicules Serge for spending so much money. It takes nearly the full 90 minutes for Marc to come clean about the reasons why he is so worked up about Serge’s purchase. One is that with this purchase Serge shows himself more influenced by the taste of a crowd of friends with whom he’s grown closer – which means he’s less influenced by Marc’s taste. His other reason is his attitude about art. “I don’t believe in the values which dominate contemporary art. The rule of novelty. The rule of surprise.”
Both of his reasons – one about friendship, the other about art — are worth exploring. But they aren’t developed at all; they’re just throwaway lines, meant to suggest a depth to the comedy without there being any actual digging. It’s telling that the comic bit in “Art” that makes by far the best landing is Corden’s breathless, desperate account of the complications and aggravations involved with planning his forthcoming wedding – which has nothing to do with art or friendship.
Right before I attended “Art,” I paid a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, a brisk ten-minute walk away, to renew my membership, and, just for the hell of it, I searched for an all-white painting. I found Ad Reinhardt’s “Number 107” which is dated from 1950 and Kazimir Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition: White on White’” from 1918. (Photographs of these don’t do them justice, since much of their appeal is in the texture and what one of the labels calls “subtle chromatic variations.”) Another in MoMA’s collection but not on display: Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting from 1951. In other words, even when Reza first wrote “Art” in French in 1994, she was whatever the French equivalent of beating a dead horse.
More relevant to this second Broadway production is a current exhibition in the museum’s lower level, “Face Value,” which “invites us to take a close look at the celebrity-making machinery of the 20th-century Hollywood star system.”
Art
Music Box Theater through December 21
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $94 – $521
Written by Yasmina Reza; Translated by Christopher Hampton
Directed by Scott Ellis
David Rockwell (Set Design), Linda Cho (Costume Design), Jen Schriever (Lighting Design), Mikaal Sulaiman (Sound Design) and Kid Harpoon (Original Music).
Cast: Bobby Cannavale, James Corden and Neil Patrick Harris
