The three stars appear to be having great fun even when their respective characters are at each other’s throat. It doesn’t matter that Yasmina Reza wrote stick figures rather than characters for her play “Art,” which won the Tony Award for best play back in 1998. She instead sets up a series of premises in which Marc (Bobby Cannavale), Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) and Yvan (James Corden) are able to sound off against each and take sides. Friendship triangles like this one are made so someone feels left out.
The current revival of “Art” opened Tuesday at the Music Box, and it is a reminder of how far the theater has traveled since the late 20th Century.
First off, while Reza’s play won that Tony right before the turn of the millenium, there are at least a dozen better plays that opened last season in New York City. And second, the two major topics of Reza’s play hark back to a less jaded time when modern art and psychiatry could provoke such controversy.
“Controversy” is probably the wrong word. Even in 1998, modern art and psychiatry were joked about relentlessly in TV network sitcoms. No matter, there was Reza, the premiere maker of boulevard comedies at the time, more than ready to run those two subjects through the laugh wringer one more time.
In “Art,” Zerge has bought a painting that is basically a white canvas and his friend Marc calls it “shit.” Yvan is their sad-sack friend who keeps switching sides on this major discussion. Yvan is also getting married, and halfway through the play he spills his guts on a major problem he has regarding wedding invitations. It goes on and on, and, of course, Corden milks the extended moment for everything he’s got in a performance that screams, “Give me the Tony!”
In this respect, “Art” is a poor man’s “Glengarry Glenross.” Here are plays that are often revived because stars want to appear in them so they can deliver these showy acting-class scenes.
Watching this revival, you might wonder why Harris and Cannavale didn’t switch roles; the change would have given their characters’ ongoing fight more frisson. The two actors are cast to type here, with Harris playing the persnickety pretentious one who has bought the painting and Cannavale playing the rough philistine whose idea of art ended sometime before the Impressionists.
After all the shouting and yelling in “Art,” Reza glibly resolves the men’s differences in an epilogue that smacks of contrivance. The play should be titled “Kitsch.”
Scott Ellis directs.
