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,

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