Bobby Cannavale, James Corden, and Neil Patrick Harris in Art. Photo: Matthew Murphy
Yasmina Reza’s early play Art, which bounced from Paris to New York via London in 1994-98, pulling top honors along the way, is not the subtlest of scripts. In it she posits a trio of midlife male friends who embody distinct personality types. Serge (Bobby Cannavale) is a hard-nosed aeronautical engineer and self-styled aesthete; Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) a rich dermatologist. Barely holding up his end is their nebbishy third wheel, Yvan (James Corden), who’s transitioning from textiles to stationery sales after a less than meteoric career path.
It’s an off-balance troika, to be sure, which comes crashing to a halt when Marc spends a small fortune on an all-white painting. But is it? He claims to discern subtle variations in hue; Serge calls nonsense (“You paid three hundred thousand dollars for this shit?”), and Yvan, caught in the middle, tries to broker a détente. Busy gearing up for a mid-life marriage, with step-relations clamoring for primacy on all sides, Yvan just wants to maintain, within this long-standing friendship, one small island of relative sanity – an unmuddied canvas, if you will.
As the two antagonists argue tediously, Yvan has a full-on meltdown, which Corden executes so skillfully, that one scene warrants the price of admission – and not just because Yvan scores the empathy vote. Corden lets us see a real human, not an intellectual construct. Ivan may be a craven accommodator, but at least the leading (albeit flawed, faltering) man in him comes with his own script.
It’s a pity that the dialogue didn’t get a bit more Anglicized in its journey: In Christopher Hampton’s translation, the dialogue is often turgid, and allusions to the poetry of Paul Valéry aren’t much of a signifier for the average Broadway theatergoer. Yvan’s dilemma, though, as he hovers uncomfortably at the tippy edge of the careerist rat race, is universal, overleaping country of origin. The laughs that Corden earns arrive striated with relatable rue.
Details: Art. To December 21.