<\/p>\n
Is there anything left of the old concept of debate? The practice of good-faith argument feels harder and harder to find, even as bad-faith confrontation thrives. The whole process of civic debate now seems locked in a rage-baiting pantomime, its outcomes measured not in productive thinking but in \u201cengagement metrics\u201d registered by separate, furious publics.<\/p>\n
The revival of Yasmina Reza\u2019s \u201cArt,\u201d from 1994\u2014directed at the Music Box by Scott Ellis in a production starring James Corden, Neil Patrick Harris, and Bobby Cannavale\u2014offers a hint about how the discourse got so out of hand. Not much happens in \u201cArt\u201d: three bourgeois friends disagree on a matter of taste, and, instead of talking normally about it over a drink, they make increasingly savage personal attacks whenever they meet. Reza, a Parisian playwright and novelist, won a Tony for \u201cArt\u201d in 1998 and another for her even sluggier slugfest, \u201cGod of Carnage,\u201d in 2009. In these influential insult comedies, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, Reza satirizes the vapidity and pettiness of the upper-middle class; the more her characters rail at one another, the more they seem like puppets in a contemporary Punch-and-Judy show.<\/p>\n
\u201cArt\u201d was a mile marker in the last quarter-century\u2019s march toward bad-faith argument as popular entertainment, which is another way of saying\u2014I can\u2019t laugh at it now. The setup, at least, is tidily comic. Serge (Harris), a shallow dermatologist with deep pockets, pays three hundred thousand dollars for a white-on-white minimalist painting. It\u2019s by an artist, he says proudly, collected by the Centre Pompidou, but when he shows the canvas off to his longtime friend, the aeronautical engineer Marc (Cannavale), Marc says it\u2019s \u201cshit.\u201d The two then badger their go-along-to-get-along friend Yvan (Corden) for his opinion, maybe because they\u2019re tired of hearing him complain about his upcoming marriage. Yvan, who has recently landed in the stationery business, arrives onstage while delivering a bravura monologue about wedding-invitation drama, by far the funniest moment in this production. It also momentarily unites his bickering friends: \u201cWhy do you let yourself be fucked over by all these women?\u201d Marc asks, as Serge nods. At least Serge and Marc will always have misogyny.<\/p>\n
The \u201cart\u201d (Reza\u2019s title was originally meant to appear in quotation marks) exists as a thin pretext for the trio\u2019s quarrels, and so the play operates at its own level of light abstraction. We\u2019re not actually meant to believe that people behave this way. Serge hauls his purportedly costly canvas on- and offstage, clearly not worried that he might clip a doorframe. (It\u2019s a prop, and Harris treats it like a prop.) Reza\u2019s stage directions call for a setting that\u2019s as \u201cstripped down and neutral as possible,\u201d which the set designer, David Rockwell, has interpreted as a bland, gray Sartrean antechamber. (Hell is finding out what your friends say about you.) The painting becomes a metaphorical screen against which the play can project its critique of taste as a signifier of identity, virtue, and power. Marc, for instance, has always believed that he is the alpha dog of the trio, but that status is threatened when he can\u2019t bully the others into submission. \u201cYou should never leave your friends unchaperoned,\u201d he says. They might form their own opinions.<\/p>\n
According to a profile by Judith Thurman in this magazine, Reza finished \u201cArt\u201d in six weeks because she writes \u201cimprovising as I go along, not thinking too much.\u201d That\u2019s sometimes apparent. The play grows repetitive, and we have time to conclude that, if it were a real situation, someone would surely leave such a tiresome battle royale. To keep the melee going, Reza must continually throw her characters at one another, like a cockfighter pushing her birds back into the ring. Harris and Cannavale are flatter and less confident here than I\u2019ve ever seen them. Only Corden, whose last stage performance in New York was in the hyperkinetic Richard Bean commedia dell\u2019arte adaptation \u201cOne Man, Two Guvnors,\u201d has the clowning chops to pull off what, in its bones, is a farce. At one point, Yvan decides that he ought to leave, but he\u2019s not quite sure whether he will, and Corden puts him into a hilariously indecisive spin, as if Yvan is stuck in an invisible revolving door.<\/p>\n
In 1994, Reza was making hay from the idea that there is no inherent, pre-social self that truly \u201clikes\u201d an object. She was writing in an intellectual atmosphere deeply influenced by the literary critic Ren\u00e9 Girard, who proposed the theory of mimetic desire. \u201cMan is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,\u201d Girard observed. Yet she could just as easily have been composing \u201cArt\u201d today, staring down at her white page under the harsh glare of the internet panopticon. Online, you hear constant echoes of Marc\u2019s suspicion that opinion is just another currency to garner status. To like or not to like? Perhaps you can tell that I didn\u2019t much like \u201cArt,\u201d but I was intrigued, at least, by the feeling that Reza and her spiky play couldn\u2019t care less.<\/p>\n
Dial the clock back another hundred years or so and you find the ne plus ultra in using the theatre as a boxing ring: Henrik Ibsen, the father of both theatrical realism and the play of ideas, who crashed opposing paradigms together in his dramas to see which would win. In \u201cA Doll\u2019s House,\u201d he set a woman\u2019s duty to her family against the needs of her unconstrained spirit; in \u201cAn Enemy of the People,\u201d he pitched a doctor\u2019s duty to public health against a community\u2019s economic comfort. In those two well-known plays, Ibsen favored the individuals over society, and so we think of him as the creator of truthful, uncompromising heroes, puncturing the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century Norway.<\/p>\n
But Ibsen never settled on a single thesis. In \u201cThe Wild Duck,\u201d from 1884, he made the truthful, uncompromising character into the monster of the piece. That monster is Gregers Werle (Alexander Hurt), who returns to his home town only to find that his childhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal (a superbly comic Nick Westrate) has been living in a fool\u2019s paradise. Hjalmar\u2019s wife, Gina (Melanie Field), has long hidden a past entanglement with Werle\u2019s wealthy father, H\u00e5kon (Robert Stanton), the revelation of which would tear their marriage apart. Their adoring fourteen-year-old daughter, Hedvig (Maaike Laanstra-Corn), believes her layabout father to be a great inventor, but this, too, is a comforting lie. Ibsen here paints one of his most beautiful (and strange) portraits of a delusional but deeply loving household. Inside a room in their apartment, Hjalmar, his father (David Patrick Kelly), and Hedvig have built a shabby, shadowy simulacrum of the northern woods for a wild duck with a damaged wing. This hidden Eden satisfies them all\u2014at least until the zealot Gregers, intent on exposing Hjalmar\u2019s illusions, slithers in.<\/p>\n
The production, directed by Simon Godwin from a version by David Eldridge, takes a while to find itself, perhaps because Ibsen dumps exposition into an unbearably clunky first scene or because the play doesn\u2019t introduce its heart, Hedvig, for nearly half an hour. The child, of course, will be the one who pays the price for Gregers\u2019s truth-telling, as he destroys the foundation of her parents\u2019 relationship. The astonishing Laanstra-Corn does not play Hedvig purely as an innocent; there\u2019s something as dangerous and emotionally labile in her shocked face as there is in Gregers\u2019s explosive outbursts. Yet only the audience seems to be able to see how the adults\u2019 toxicity is building up inside her mind and how\u2014since she will not hate her father\u2014she is coming to hate herself.<\/p>\n
Theatres don\u2019t perform \u201cThe Wild Duck\u201d as much as, say, \u201cA Doll\u2019s House,\u201d maybe because it\u2019s terribly, terribly sad. To me, though, it\u2019s the most honest of Ibsen\u2019s plays. Here, the great theatrical advocate of wisdom-through-argument admits that argument itself has treacherous ramifications. Debate\u2019s cut and thrust can be easily misunderstood by the young, Ibsen says\u2014especially by those who turn its violence on themselves.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is there anything left of the old concept of debate? The practice of good-faith argument feels harder and harder to find, even as bad-faith confrontation thrives. The whole process of civic debate now seems locked in a rage-baiting pantomime, its outcomes measured not in productive thinking but in \u201cengagement metrics\u201d registered by separate, furious publics. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2031258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[22008,343871,374654],"class_list":["post-2031257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-magazine","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","tag-the-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Yasmina-Rezas-Art-Feeds-Our-Appetite-for-Argument-as-Entertainment.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2031257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2031258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2031257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2031257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2031257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}