By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: March 23, 2009
Never underestimate the pleasure of watching really good actors behaving terribly. Of course you can experience such a spectacle every year around Oscar time. But there is a more sophisticated version of this spectator sport, in which highly skilled stage performers take on roles that allow them to rip the stuffing out of one another, tear up the scenery, stomp on their own vanity and have the time of their lives.
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Spring Theater Special | Faces to Watch: Yasmina Reza (February 22, 2009)
The Alpha Males of ‘Carnage’ (March 22, 2009)
Times Topics: Yasmina Reza | James Gandolfini
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels as a Brooklyn couple in Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage.”
That’s what Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden are up to at the Bernard Jacobs Theater, where Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage” opened Sunday night under the extremely savvy direction of Matthew Warchus. And their performances in Ms. Reza’s streamlined anatomy of the human animal incite the kind of laughter that comes from the gut, as involuntary as hiccups or belching.
Examined coldly, this 90-minute play about two couples who meet to discuss a playground fight between two of their children isn’t much more than a sustained Punch and Judy show, dressed to impress with sociological accessories. But there’s a reason that Punch and Judy’s avatars have fascinated audiences for so many centuries in cultural forms low (“The Honeymooners” of 1950s television) and high (Edward Albee’s 1962 drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”).
“God of Carnage,” which is poised somewhere in between, definitely delivers the cathartic release of watching other people’s marriages go boom. A study in the tension between civilized surface and savage instinct, this play (which recently won the Olivier Award in London for best new comedy) is itself a satisfyingly primitive entertainment with an intellectual veneer.
As she did in “Life x 3” (seen on Broadway in 2003) and her Tony-winning “Art” (1998), Ms. Reza walks a comfortable middle ground between high and low, pretending to fathom depths when she’s really just stirring them with her finger. As with those earlier plays “God of Carnage” follows the formula (think of it as slapstick with a slide rule) of taking three or four smug, upper-middle-class characters and stripping them, with algebraic precision, to their lonely, frightened ids. In this instance farce trumps formula, and “God of Carnage” is the richer for it.
Ms. Reza’s subjects are two sets of parents in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. (The excellent and easygoing translation from French by the playwright Christopher Hampton, Ms. Reza’s frequent collaborator, has been Americanized for stateside audiences.) Alan (Mr. Daniels), a corporate lawyer, and Annette (Ms. Davis), a “wealth manager,” visit the apartment of Michael (Mr. Gandolfini), a wholesaler, and Veronica (Ms. Harden), a writer, to discuss how best to deal with a common problem.
Alan and Annette’s son has hit Michael and Veronica’s son with a stick, breaking two of his teeth. The grown-ups have gathered to discuss, logically and amiably, how to deal with the boys. “Fortunately,” says Veronica, the loftiest-minded of the lot, “there is still such a thing as the art of coexistence, isn’t there?”
Of course there’s not. Fissures in the friendliness are evident from the get-go, as the couples sip espresso, sample Veronica’s clafouti and ooh and ah over art books. The question is how long before the fault lines split open altogether, allowing free rein to “the god of carnage,” whom Alan, an executive shark type, admits proudly to believing in. We are all controlled by our viscera, the play says, and it makes good on the theory early when (be warned) an anxious Annette vomits all over the coffee table (and all those precious books).
Ms. Reza links the spouses’ degeneration to a larger picture of a feral dog-eat-dog world. The cellphone calls that Alan keeps taking without apology have to do with damage control for a pharmaceutical giant’s wonder drug that has turned into a problem drug. Veronica is a specialist in African culture and writing a book on “the Darfur tragedy.”
But the play is far more interesting (and subtle) in its shifting ballet of emotions and loyalties among its fractious quartet. As rum replaces coffee and outer garments are removed, sides of combat blur. The men gang up on the women, the women gang up on the men, and the husbands and wives wind up, briefly, changing partners (though only as allies in war).
The play begins with the characters regarding their spouses as guaranteed confederates, and it ends with all of them realizing that they’re on their own. At the same time there are throughout enough instances of small acts of helpfulness and kindness to keep the play from being a blunt broadside. “People struggle until they’re dead,” Alan observes. And to its credit, “God of Carnage” sees that struggle as more than exclusively hostile.
Still, on the page the play doesn’t amount to much. It needs the fine-honed idiosyncrasies and unconditional commitment to unsympathetic characters that the actors here provide. They’re a marvelously giving, balanced ensemble. And each has bits of inspired invention that you tuck away into your memory file of classic stage moments: Mr. Gandolfini, in his first Broadway performance since he found fame as Tony Soprano, ingenuously defending cruelty to a pet hamster or conscientiously holding a blow dryer to damaged art books; Ms. Harden solemnly wrestling for control of the rum bottle; Ms. Davis’s nausea-prone character toting a plastic basin like a worried toddler; and Mr. Daniels obliviously shoveling down clafouti while talking on the phone.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Spring Theater Special | Faces to Watch: Yasmina Reza (February 22, 2009)
The Alpha Males of ‘Carnage’ (March 22, 2009)
Times Topics: Yasmina Reza | James Gandolfini
But give full credit to Mr. Warchus, who staged Ms. Reza’s “Art” and “Life x 3” on Broadway and knows that words are to physical comedy what step-by-step drawings of footprints are to dancing. It’s the bodies in motion that count. Mr. Warchus is the man who transformed the sniggering 1960s sex comedy “Boeing-Boeing” into one of last season’s great delights on Broadway, and I can’t think of another working director who better understands the higher mathematics of farce.
Working with the designers Mark Thompson (set and costumes) and Hugh Vanstone (lighting), Mr. Warchus has created an eloquent blend of the chthonic (blood-red background, cracked-mud walls) and the civilized (minimalist furniture, exquisite vases of tulips). The show’s very look predicts what’s going to happen, and you can imagine where those tulips will wind up.
What you can’t imagine is the artful course that Mr. Warchus and his performers take. “God of Carnage” may be a familiar comic journey from A to B, but it travels first class.
GOD OF CARNAGE
By Yasmina Reza; translated by Christopher Hampton; directed by Matthew Warchus; sets and costumes by Mark Thompson; lighting by Hugh Vanstone; music by Gary Yershon; sound by Simon Baker/Christopher Cronin; production stage manager, Jill Cordle; production manager, Aurora Productions; general manager, STP/David Turner. Presented by Robert Fox, David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers, Stuart Thompson, the Shubert Organization, Scott Rudin, Jon B. Platt and the Weinstein Company. At the Bernard Jacobs Theater, 242 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through July 19. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Jeff Daniels (Alan), Hope Davis (Annette), James Gandolfini (Michael) and Marcia Gay Harden (Veronica).
Christine Lahti ( Veronica), Annie Potts (Annette), Ken Scott (michael) and Jimmy Smits ( Alan)
