‘Art’ Applies Themes on Taste to Fragility of Friendships

Perhaps it should be called “Taste” or “Three Men and a Painting.” But “Art,” the international hit by French playwright Yasmina Reza, is only marginally about art. The play uses a white painting as a red herring to explore a common conundrum of intimacy. What happens when an intimate friend loves something you hate, or hates something you love?

Earlier this month, “Art” found a handsome home on Broadway at the Royale Theatre, where American audiences are discovering Reza’s elegantly structured dialectic on friendship. The play is not as hard-hitting as it stakes claim to being but is quite pleasurable nonetheless. Translated into English by playwright Christopher Hampton, “Art” attracts actors of high stature. Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay starred in London.

On Broadway, Victor Garber is Serge, the dermatologist who buys a white painting with horizontal white lines, for 200,000 French francs, about $40,000. As he displays the canvas, his beatific grin suggests he has found the answer to life itself. This smile is more than his friend Marc can take. Marc (Alan Alda) smiles too, but he is appalled. Alda employs his warm, familiar grin, but behind it is fear and meanness. While Serge waits in anticipation for Marc’s verdict, Marc takes his time, putting his glasses on, taking them off. When he pronounces his verdict--a scatological metaphor--he can’t hide his delight: He’s finally found an acceptable way to articulate the superiority he’s long felt toward Serge.

British actor Alfred Molina (“Prick Up Your Ears,” “Boogie Nights”) is the third wheel, Yvan. By his harmless, bear-like carriage you can tell he doesn’t take pride in his aesthetic sense, the way his two friends do. He takes pride in his diplomacy. Privately, with Marc, Yvan laughs over Serge’s expenditure. But when Serge shows him the painting, Yvan is absurdly uncomfortable. The look on his face offers not a response, but a desperate attempt to figure out what his response should be. Yvan’s predicament is hilarious, and the audience clearly recognizes and relishes it. And while it delights the audience, Yvan’s fence-walking makes him a vulnerable target in the mudslinging to come.

The roles are clean, spare and yet meaty; between the lines they offer room to show off solid comic timing--in gradations of annoyance, bemusement, one-upmanship and hatred. These are the kinds of roles in which actors who appear to be just hanging back can gracefully step forward and hit the ball out of the park on a word or a look. And, under British director Matthew Warchus, all three have their delicious moments.

The ties of civility that bind us are tenuous. The possibility of transgressing friendship’s tacit rules is often tempting, and when we transgress, terrible things are said. Serge takes Marc’s rejection of his painting personally--he should, it’s meant to be personal. So Serge decides to make the argument explicitly personal. With the look of a cat keeping one paw on the tail of a mouse, Serge tells Marc what he really thinks of Marc’s longtime girlfriend Paula. Serge’s slow, vicious condemnation of one of Paula’s signature gestures gives him inordinate, terrible pleasure. And the play seems to have hit its mark.

But, in fact, “Art” feels truly dangerous only for two moments--this one and then when Marc takes his revenge. But Reza pulls her punches in a coda that says: I’m not really willing to go there after all. “Art” ends rather like a “Twilight Zone” episode in which everything is just the same as it was in the beginning, and no one’s sure how much--if any--damage has been done.

On the occasion of “Art,” critics on two continents have written essays on why the white-on-white painting is too passe a phenomenon to incite intense discussion by anyone actually in the know. But, in fact, the painting is a good symbol through which to explore the issue of incomprehensible, infuriating preferences, ones that incite superiority or hatch massive self-doubt. Why can some conflicting opinions peacefully coexist while others threaten the very foundation of a relationship? These are mysteries of the human ego that the play summons forth but leaves relatively undisturbed.

Whatever its flaws, “Art” obviously touches on a powerful anxiety about taste, and about the often looming distance between what we like and what we feel we’re supposed to like. It touches on it, but, rather like the painting itself, it leaves the rest to you.

* “Art,” Royale Theatre, 242 W. 45th St., (800) 432-7250.