Theater review: Yasmina Reza’s Art

★★

“Let’s end the suspense right away: All three are fine,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in The New York Times. Neil Patrick Harris, Bobby Cannavale, and James Corden headline the new Broadway revival of Yasmina Reza’s 1994 play about a friendship that implodes after one of the three male pals pays $300,000 for a minimalist all-white painting. Harris and Cannavale, whose lines should draw the most blood, “can come off as guarded, as if they’re fencing with blunted tips.” But Corden “makes a meal” of his big moments, and Reza’s 31-year-old drama proves “a lot more interesting than a mere star vehicle.” Today, after all, people are even more inclined to define themselves by their tastes and purchases.

Art “satirizes the vapidity and pettiness of the upper-middle class,” but “I can’t laugh at it anymore,” said Helen Shaw in The New Yorker. The play, which won a Tony in 1998, was “a mile marker in the last quarter-century’s march toward bad-faith argument as popular entertainment,” and it’s hard now to find such an exercise amusing, especially because Harris and Cannavale are “flatter and less confident here than I’ve ever seen them.”

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It’s also unclear what we’re supposed to take away from this revival, said Naveen Kumar in The Washington Post. Since 1998, “the question of what kind of art has value, who determines it, and why has assumed an urgency with which the production is totally out of step.” While Reza’s observations about the way we construct our sense of self in relation to others remain trenchant, there’s “a conservatism to the nostalgia being exercised here,” in that the actors, like the offending painting, are all white. “That’s fine on principle, but a bore,” as well as “a missed opportunity to deepen the play’s own interests.”