Theater review
ART
Ninety minutes with no intermission at the Music Box Theatre.
Much in the way that Serge’s two best friends cannot fathom why he purchased a totally white painting for $300,000, I fail to understand the enduring popularity of the play “Art.”
French writer Yasmina Reza’s 1998 whine-and-cheese comedy, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on Tuesday night in an askew revival starring Neil Patrick Harris, James Corden and Bobby Cannavale, remains a slim, one-joke, pseudo-intellectual affair that gratingly and exhaustingly works to send up fellow pseudo intellectuals.
Think of it as a sword fight with pinkies.
And to un peu extent, “Art”’s velvet-soft satire succeeds. As the lights fade out at the end, the audience is in collective, unspoken agreement that Serge, Yvan and Marc are ridiculous, trivial, self-absorbed je-suis jerks that no sane person could bear to spend five minutes with.
Not that the show excitingly builds to any such conclusion. We have them clocked after just a couple of scenes. There are some early giggles about Serge’s pricey purchase (“How much?” “Three hundred thousand.” “Very reasonable.”), and then the plot devolves into the white noise of shapeless academic squawking.
Just as in “God of Carnage” (which is much funnier), Reza crafts an amusing upper-middle-class situation and then willy-nilly shoves character development into the butler’s kitchen. In “Art,” escalating drama gets the brush too.
She goes all-in on faux-wit, though. The pretentious trio drone on about modernism, Seneca, the poet Paul Valéry, deconstruction, homeopathy, therapy, partners and do-nothing jobs. Some comments tickle, and many are banal. Scott Ellis’ direction — on David Rockwell’s set that’s spare as the canvas — is both physically rigid and narratively unruly.
In the second half, nothing seems to matter whatsoever.
Every word and action is unnatural, like the actors have yardsticks down the backs of their shirts. Much of the stiffness is baked in, of course. Being that the script about snobs was originally French, and has been translated by British writer Christopher Hampton, even affectations have affectations.
All the while, a 25-year friendship is falling apart over disagreements on the controversial painting. However, it’s awfully hard to accept that the old chums are parting ways when the performers click like they first met that night at 7:59 p.m.
Playing Serge, Harris is the most sensibly cast of the stars. He often plays humorous sophisticates and it’s not farfetched that he might stare at a blank canvas with a nice Burgundy.
The other two are not so convincing. Cannavale, as eldest Marc, comes off like a cop bought a Hugh Hefner smoking jacket at a Halloween store, and Corden, bumbling about as Yvan, performs “One Painting, Two Guvnors.”
The former “Late Late Show” host gets the biggest speech — in length and weight — as he embarks on a frantic rant about the pain the verbiage of his wedding invitations has caused.
Even though it turns into an indecipherable ramble midway through, the crowd applauded as if they’d just witnessed a Carpool Monologue. Unsurprisingly, the actor is highly watchable. Yet at Corden’s most entertaining, he’s his least connected.
So, Reza’s play of petty bickering makes my eyes glaze over. But plenty of people, including former Post critics, have lapped it up over the years. Such is “Art.”
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