\n<\/p>\n
\n\tI am among the many potential audience members for \u201cArt,\u201d the new revival of Yazmina Reza\u2019s sly, knowing play, who has never thought much about James Corden. That\u2019s not to say I haven\u2019t thought much of <\/em>him \u2014 from what clips I\u2019ve seen of his now-concluded CBS talk show, he seems game and winning. Unfortunately, his Tony-winning turn in \u201cOne Man, Two Guvnors,\u201d in 2012, predates my peak theatergoing years; to many in my cohort, Corden was a content-generation machine, ginning up \u201cCarpool Karaoke\u201d segments that were fun but ephemeral.<\/p>\n \n\tSome two years removed from the end of his \u201cLate Late Show,\u201d Corden is reasserting himself as a major theater actor, and his turn as the wobbliest vertex of a friendship triangle would, alone, make the new production of this slippery social satire worth seeing. Happily, though, the play\u2019s depths reward a second look on Broadway (following a 1998 run that won the top Tony). The current Broadway climate has been thick on the ground with revivals of familiar titles anchored by big-name stars; the performances in \u201cArt\u201d \u2014 including and especially Corden\u2019s alongside Bobby Cannavale and Neil Patrick Harris \u2014 make the case for this as something more urgent than that.<\/p>\n \n\tThe play, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, concerns itself with the terrain of heterosexual male friendship \u2014 a rewarding topic for an adept playwright, given how much subtext lies beneath the surface, but a challenging one to dramatize for just the same reason. (One solution to the problem that so much goes unsaid between friends: All three address the audience in soliloquys at various points. Director Scott Ellis and lighting designer Jen Schriever, shifting the lights as we enter the characters\u2019 minds, make these transitions land.) Harris\u2019 Serge is delighted by his purchase of a $300,000 canvas; the term \u201ccanvas\u201d is used advisedly, as it\u2019s unclear at first whether paint has been applied to it at all. It\u2019s solid white. Cannavale\u2019s Marc is repulsed by Serge\u2019s judgment, while Corden\u2019s Yvan \u2014 the kind of old friend one keeps around past the point one remembers what about him one used to like \u2014 is just happy to be part of the conversation.<\/p>\n \n\tReza\u2019s other best-known play stateside, \u201cGod of Carnage,\u201d placed two forces \u2014 two married couples representing slightly but insistently divergent social classes \u2014 into conflict. With a party of three, things are trickier: Over the course of the play, the distinctions that seemed small at first are amplified: Serge\u2019s pride in his painting, for instance, is amplified by quite how much a bite out of his finances its price tag represents. That it\u2019s such an outlay of cash \u2014 that, at least for their class of modern Parisians, Serge is comfortable but not truly rich \u2014 also accounts in some part for Marc\u2019s anger. (A choice likely borne of practicality ends up bearing fruit: As the play has one set, the characters\u2019 apartments, by scenic designer David Rockwell, are effectively identical but for what\u2019s on the walls. Their differences, in other words, are marginal, even as those differences take over their lives.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tYvan being obviously less well-off than his two compatriots, and thus nearly entirely excluded from their higher-level conversation about how they\u2019re spending their wealth, builds in tension to an outright explosion. The various pressures in Yvan\u2019s own life (pressures to which his friends are blind) push him to melt down, which seems to be about tensions around his impending marriage but ends up being about\u2026 well, everything. It hardly help matters that his friends aren\u2019t merely listening ears but take the opportunity to finally share with Yvan the ways in which they think he\u2019s ruining his own life.<\/p>\n \n\tThis review isn\u2019t meant to slight Cannavale and Harris: The former is characteristically able to conjure smartest-guy-in-the-room umbrage, as if irritated to even be forced to explain himself, while the latter is at his best when preening over his new investment. (Just under the surface, Harris lets us understand, is a fear that there\u2019s a joke he\u2019s not quite getting.) But it\u2019s Corden, who wraps up his scene of rage pallid and gasping in a manner that somehow doesn\u2019t feel showy and unearned, who\u2019s the standout. When he reaches a point beyond reason, it\u2019s a moment that transforms, first, our sense of what the performer can do and, then, the play itself. Up to Corden\u2019s breakdown, the play\u2019s been in a tradition of talky comedies of manners that stretches from \u201cSeinfeld\u201d back to Wilde and Moli\u00e8re; after it, we\u2019re on more treacherous ground, and, suddenly, anything seems possible. The play itself becomes a blank white space waiting for the actors to color it with something unexpected.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhich may help account for why the play\u2019s conclusion hits with such seismic force. Suffice it to say that all parties\u2019 views of the empty canvas \u2014 one that, Serge insists at first, is suffused with Rothko-esque bands of color, if you just know how to look \u2014 have shifted by the time they hash out their disagreement. That one character claims to find within it a man who traverses a great distance makes a poetic sort of sense. All three of these characters end up far from where they began, having been pushed there by a conflict that seemed at first to be entirely insubstantial. Say this much: At least one of the actors, returning to the stage after having fun on the sillier side of pop culture for a while, is far from where he\u2019s been, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am among the many potential audience members for \u201cArt,\u201d the new revival of Yazmina Reza\u2019s sly, knowing play, who has never thought much about James Corden. That\u2019s not to say I haven\u2019t thought much of him \u2014 from what clips I\u2019ve seen of his now-concluded CBS talk show, he seems game and winning. Unfortunately,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[9797,13377,13378,817,2658],"class_list":{"0":"post-21832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-broadway","9":"tag-corden","10":"tag-impresses","11":"tag-james","12":"tag-play"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}