#yasmina-reza

#yasmina-reza

Not much happens in "Art": three bourgeois friends disagree on a matter of taste, and, instead of talking normally about it over a drink, they make increasingly savage personal attacks whenever they meet. Reza, a Parisian playwright and novelist, won a Tony for "Art" in 1998 and another for her even sluggier slugfest, "God of Carnage," in 2009. In these influential insult comedies, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, Reza satirizes the vapidity and pettiness of the upper-middle class;

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.

Ares represented the Greek god of war, while Mars served this role for the Romans; Tyr held the same position for the Norse.