Outside on the street after the final curtain of Yasmina Reza’s Art, I heard two women behind me discussing the play. “No,” said the one to the other, “it was a test of friendship: Don’t let the little shit get in the way. It wasn’t about the art.” You’re bang-on, lady, and in more ways than one. Neither the play nor Scott Ellis’s yuks-forward revival starring Bobby Cannavale, Neil Patrick Harris, and James Corden really has much to do with the subject of its title. Reza herself knew as much: Though the new Broadway artwork does away with them, there’s a contemptuous little pair of air quotes in the show’s name as written. In Reza’s French, it’s «Art»; in Christopher Hampton’s English translation (which premiered in London in 1996, two years after the play’s first outing in Paris, and is in use again here), it’s ‘Art.’ Reza could be looking down her nose at the white painting that spurs so much discord between the three friends in her play, or she could be performing an ironic self-own, particularly sinister in light of the show’s ongoing global success.
Either way, those quotation marks are the first signs of a cynicism that pervades Reza’s project, now expanding to enshroud this whole production. As always, and especially with revivals, there’s the play in a vacuum and then there’s the performance in its context, and the context here is that Art is a story about three middle-aged men, largely white and wealthy, that’s returning to Broadway in a season already rife with frustration about what feels like an overall swing back toward male-heavy programming — not to mention in a wider moment when drumming up a great deal of compassion for the woes of dermatologists who buy $300,000 paintings feels like a big ask. It also follows on the heels of last spring’s big vehicle for three famous men, Glengarry Glen Ross, another revival no one asked for and another play that makes it painfully obvious just how long ago the ’80s and ’90s really were.
Well, painful to some. Of course the point of these productions is to appeal to — or try to force into being — a different demographic: They’re banking on an audience who’s wistful for the days when men were men and comedies were comedies — also an audience that enjoys giving three separate rounds of entrance applause. As a director, Ellis is happy to put his trio of stars in the terrarium of a bland upscale apartment and let them go for the punch lines. All three are nimble with comedy, and it’s not that there’s nothing funny in Art; it’s that the material makes the atmosphere in the room too thin to work up the breath for a good laugh. A self-own Reza might not have foreseen in 1994 now comes out of the mouth of one of her own characters: “These nostalgia merchants have become quite breathtakingly arrogant.”
That’s Serge (Harris) talking, in one of Reza’s short pop-out soliloquies, about his friend Marc (Cannavale). Marc, sniffs Serge, is “one of those new-style intellectuals” who “take some sort of incomprehensible pride” in sneering at anything modern. Tensions are crackling between the pals of 25 years because Serge has bought an ultraexpensive painting. “Five feet by four: white,” grumbles Marc. “The background is white, and if you screw up your eyes, you can make out some fine white diagonal lines.” Marc — buoyantly irascible in Cannavale’s gravel-voiced, opinionated-Italian-uncle interpretation — is annoyed. No, more than annoyed; he’s disturbed on a gut level, increasingly infuriated in ways it will take him the next 90 minutes to articulate. The question is whether his oldest friendships, with both the prim Serge and the anxious people pleaser Yvan (Corden), will survive the wrath provoked by the great white rectangle.
Reza’s work was billed as edgy, even brutal, when it first hit the stage, but the years since have really moved the bar on brutality. In 2025, for all the play’s bickering and bashing, the eventual trajectory of Art feels almost saccharine. As the woman on the street boiled it down, “Don’t let the little shit get in the way.” That’s not a play, it’s an embroidered pillow. What’s disturbing to me on a gut level is twofold. First, the implicit designation of art, all art, as “the little shit” cracks the door on both anti-intellectualism and another insidious form of nostalgia — the longing for an age when anything inflammatory (it’s not a big leap from art to politics) could, in certain houses, be put aside over a Thanksgiving turkey or a cold beer. Second, there’s Reza’s shallow commitment to MacGuffins as generators of salacious interpersonal violence. Her next play to make it big in America was 2007’s God of Carnage, the story of two couples whose lives descend into chaos when one set visits the other to discuss a playground incident between their children. It’s diet Albee, all the sniping with none of the substance. Kids, a white painting — it doesn’t matter. What matters are the punches thrown along the way. Alan Alda, one of the stars of Art’s original Broadway cast, said of the breakdown among the three friends, “If it wasn’t the white painting, it could have been a new girlfriend or a book — it could have been anything.”
That’s not actually a good thing, at least not as Reza plays it. It belies the play’s own unexplored, perhaps even unintentional implication that there really is something different, something deeper and more provocative, about art and our taste in it. Eventually, Serge lets fly some nasty remarks about Marc’s wife, Paula; both of them dump all over Yvan’s fiancée, Catherine. (Neither is ever seen.) Earlier, Marc scoffs when Serge tells him to “read Seneca” and, with jovial flippancy, tosses the book off to Yvan. So, in fact, girlfriends and books come and go, and there is, or should be, something else at play here (and something more profound than Marc’s eventual near-sociopathic confession that his sense of betrayal comes from feeling like he’s “had to mold” and, up till now, has “owned” Serge).
Reza, though, doesn’t get into it, apart from making some easy jabs at “conceptual art” and “deconstruction” and the chichi gallery world. These things aren’t legitimate concerns but coat hooks on which to hang generic contention and an overall icky view of human nature — which is why some of the play’s actually funniest stuff, in both writing and performance, occurs in a frantic two-page monologue delivered by Yvan, who hurtles into Serge’s apartment mid-meltdown over complications with his upcoming wedding. Corden makes big, broad, breathless work of the set piece, eventually crash-landing in a chair to well-earned applause. It works because it’s played well but also because it has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Neither does anything else, but at least here, the disregard is genuine.
If you prefer your violent three-handers noncommercial and replete with content warnings, then the art you may be looking for is Family, a blaring, blinding revival of Celine Song’s pre-fame play directed by Alec Duffy for his company, Hoi Polloi. Duffy’s production began its life a year ago in a Clinton Hill brownstone with only 30 audience members crowded around the story’s lurid action. Now, the director has restaged it for La MaMa’s Downstairs theater, where the allegory is in your face as soon as you walk in. Duffy is also the scenic designer, Duffy is also the designer (the set-design heavyweight Mimi Lien is billed as scenic consultant), and his set consists of an enormous American flag — real, not painted — laid across the floor, with prison-style metal fencing set up on all four sides. Sickly fluorescents hover above, and the lights and sound, by Kate McGee and Steven Leffue, respectively, are cranked up to horror-movie intensity. Things flash and roar and screech and skitter through the dark. The characters — Alice (Izabel Mar), David (Luis Feliciano), and Linus (Jonah O’Hara-David), half-siblings ostensibly gathered to mourn the death of their father — crawl and writhe and gyrate, play grotesque power games with each other, and slouch toward incest while something rots under the floorboards.
Family seems calibrated to slap you across the face, so I was surprised to leave feeling — despite the screaming and cackling and fucking, or perhaps because of them — underwhelmed. I was ready to be grabbed by the throat, but the play stayed in its own cage. There it is, after all, from the very beginning: Even without the giant flag, the siblings’ various refrains on the “house our father built” (“This house is broken,” “There is something really wrong with this house,” “Do you think maybe we should burn this house down?”) aren’t exactly a sphinxian riddle. The play was Song’s master’s thesis at Columbia in 2014, and it shows both her youth and its age. On the one hand, its barrage of leering grotesquerie (Past Lives or Materialists this is not) feels gutsy but also a little puerile; on the other, while running around and screaming “Burn it down!” atop an American flag might have felt shocking in the Obama years, it is, today, pretty much the content of every other Instagram Story.
That may well be called prescience, but without more dramatic ballast, whether or not Family’s rage was ahead of its time becomes a less compelling question. What is true here at least is that the show’s three performers are giving their all to the intentionally gross and gruesome material. Duffy gets a distinctive dark clown out of each of them, menacing or masochistic as the case may be. And at least Song’s intention is to get us thinking about the big shit, whether it’s mounted on the wall or buried beneath the floor.