White. A Blank Page or Canvas. Or Is It? Art Proves Forever Fashionable in a Starry Broadway Revival

“We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our taste and apprehension.” Swap out “whatever” for “whoever” and this line from David Hume’s 18th-century essay about aesthetic judgment explains just about everything you need to know about human judgment.

It’s no wonder that when French playwright Yasmina Reza spun this unflattering impulse into a neatly packaged three-hander about friends torn apart by a square of white paint, Art seemed to transcend the issue of “taste” altogether. It zoomed from Paris to London to New York within the same four years that saw it translated into over 20 languages (Christopher Hampton penned the English version that won the 1998 Tony for Best Play). And this was long before the Real Housewives whet our appetite for the petty feuds of the mega-wealthy, and The White Lotus turned a trio of back-biting besties into peak camp entertainment.

It’s this brave new world of short fuses and strong opinions that’s ushering in Art’s first Broadway revival at the Music Box Theatre. You could say what the play has lost in novelty, it’s gained in “resonance”—to borrow the pretentious word used by Serge (Neil Patrick Harris), Reza’s incendiary defender of an outrageously expensive piece of modern art that, to the plebeian eye, looks like a blank canvas. But demanding that Scott Ellis’s diverting, star-driven production justify its 21st-century relevance wouldn’t get to the heart of the play’s staying power. It’s not that now is a particularly right time for Art. There’s just never a wrong time for Art. And if you have three great comedic actors willing to take it for a spin, the question of why now? becomes why not?

This Art has no new bells or whistles. Just the skeleton of a sleek, modern living room (designed by David Rockwell for maximum sterility and lit by Jen Schriever) where our actors put up their hyper-verbal dukes. To broadcast who this hollow space belongs to from scene to scene, all it takes is a single piece of wall art: a French landscape for our classic snob Marc (Bobby Cannavale), a kitschy dog painting for the cuddly scatterbrain Yvan (James Corden), and for our daring aesthete Serge, the painting by “fashionable” artist Antrios that launched a thousand slights, yet to be mounted for permanent display.

The thesis is clear: You are what you find beautiful. So, where Marc and Yvan are both digestible and consistent, Serge is head-scratching and in flux. And to top it off, he’s sunk $300,000 into this bold self-renovation (the Antrios has appreciated handsomely since its $40,000 price tag in 1998, when Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina were fighting over it). To Marc, the purchase isn’t just idiotic, it’s a personal affront.

Art is as smart a commentary on friendship, identity, and the unspoken expectations that tie them together as it ever was. Sure, it’s wrapped in the veneer of high-brow aesthetic debate, but all that jibber-jabber is just intellectual varnish smoothing over the cracks in three fragile men who feel abandoned by each other.

Well, not all of them mask their vulnerabilities. As Yvan, the amiable jokester who just wants everyone to play nice, Corden is made of nothing but hilarious and sympathetic fault lines. He also makes a meal-and-a-half of Yvan’s reliably scene-stealing monologue—a frazzled rant about wedding invitations. It has a whiff of his work in One Man, Two Guvnors, the Tony-winning tour-de-force he delivered before late-night notoriety pigeonholed him as more entertainer than actor.

Between Corden and Harris, you’d think Ellis’s production might be in danger of running out of scenery to gobble up. But rest assured, Harris’s Serge remains a man of manners whose lapses must first pass through a sieve of refined grammar and fine tailoring. Linda Cho, who built The Great Gatsby’s dazzling, Tony-winning costumes, dresses all three men in unadventurous shades of navy, gray, and crimson—on purpose, no doubt.

Cannavale’s Marc, in turn, just has to wave one haughty wrist at the Antrios and you can picture that very hand swirling wine and conducting symphonies that already have a maestro. Both Serge and Marc’s varietals of douchebaggery thinly veil fear and self-doubt and it just takes a handful of artful jabs to turn these friends into enemy combatants.

As Reza proved for a second time in God of Carnage, her 2009 Tony-winning play about badly behaved parents, tugging at the tiny yarns that make humans unravel isn’t just anthropologically fascinating—it’s entertaining as hell. At least when the stakes are as low as debating the color white. “It has a white background, with a whole range of greys,” Serge negotiates as the audience chuckles. “There’s even some red in it. You could say it’s very pale.” In the bright void of the Antrios, we can all have a good laugh at this silliness—maybe, if we’re generous, even search for that subtle red hue. It’s when seeing different realities has actual consequences that things get a little darker.