UP FOR DEBATE

Yasmina Reza's "Art" and Henrik Ibsen's "The Wild Duck."

- BY HELEN SHAW

Is there anything left of the old concept of debate? The practice of good-faith argument feels harder and harder to find, even as bad-faith confrontation thrives. The whole process of civic debate now seems locked in a rage-baiting pantomime, its outcomes measured not in productive thinking but in “engagement metrics” registered by separate, furious publics.

The revival of Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” from 1994—directed at the Music Box by Scott Ellis in a production starring James Corden, Neil Patrick Harris, and Bobby Cannavale—offers a hint about how the discourse got so out of hand. 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; the more her characters rail at one another, the more they seem like puppets in a contemporary Punch-and-Judy show.

Bobby Cannavale, Neil Patrick Harris, and James Corden play arch-frenemies.