By Geary Danihy
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
If Tennyson had had the opportunity
to see Yasmina Reza’s award-winning “God of Carnage,” which recently opened at
the Darien Arts Center Stage under the capable direction of Mark Graham, he
might have considered revising his poem, for as Reza would have it, underneath
all that love and civilization lurks the beast, the worshipper of the god of
carnage, who needs little provocation to bare his, or her, fangs and claws.
Billed as “A Comedy of
Manners…without the Manners,” “God of Carnage,” translated by Christopher
Hampton, presents two oh so civilized couples whose children, two sons, have
had a schoolyard fight. Benjamin, son of Annette and Alan Raleigh (Jessie
Gilbert and Lawrence Reina), apparently took a stick to Henry, son of Michael
and Veronica Novak (Gary Betsworth and Eileen Lawless), giving the lad a puffed
lip and damaging two teeth. The Novaks have invited the Raleighs over to discuss the matter as mature
adults, because mature adults can work things out in a calm, logical, sophisticated
manner…Not!
What begins as a politically
correct discussion of the schoolyard altercation soon devolves into a visceral
autopsy of the two couples’ lives, with recriminations and insults flying as
fast and deadly as arrows at Agincourt . Reza
takes delight in scraping away at the two couples’ veneer of suburban sang froid,
but she goes deeper as the play questions humanity’s true nature, suggesting
that we really haven’t distanced ourselves from the club-wielding Neanderthals.
Much of the play’s humor is to be
found in the peeling away of the four adults’ surface personas to reveal the
feral, frightened children that huddle beneath, with the operative irony being that
the catalyst for the adult confrontation is…kids getting into a fight.
The danger in choosing to board
Reza’s play is that her four characters border on caricature. Thus it falls to
the actors, and the director, to ensure that what the audience sees on the
stage are flesh and blood humans rather than cardboard cutouts. This task the
four actors in the DAC production accomplish, by and large, with skill. As in
most relationships there will be an alpha and a beta – in the case of these two
couples, the alphas are Alan, a lawyer for a pharmaceutical company, and
Veronica, an author and champion of human rights. Reina nails the amoral
lawyer, giving us a man surgically attached to his cell phone who, throughout
the evening, continues to take calls dealing with a pending scandal about one
of the company’s drugs. His advice embraces lying and across-the-board denial.
Given the nature of alphas, Alan
and Veronica immediately antagonize each other, and Lawless plays well off
Reina’s work-obsessed character, creating a woman who is just this side of
self-righteous, who wraps her opinions and sense of self in the flag of
suffering humanity.
The two betas are Michael and
Annette. Betsworth sometimes takes his character’s submissive nature just a bit
too far, but his eruption over the death of a hamster (don’t ask) is priceless.
It is, however, Gilbert who gives us the most nuanced performance of the
evening, transforming her character from a somewhat put upon adjunct to her
husband’s life into a tigress defending her young while literally dousing her
husband’s cell-phone ardor.
The single set by David Eger is
functional but somewhat linear, which Graham initially seems to succumb to in
the opening scenes as he aligns his characters stage right to left and then
leaves them there, standing behind a table, delivering their lines. Perhaps the
blocking here is meant to convey the couples’ initial awkwardness, but it’s
just a bit too static. However, Graham soon has his actors using the full (limited)
stage area, wisely rearranging the two couples as alliances form and dissolve
and allegiances are challenged – it’s a visual enhancement of the ebb and flow
of the couples’ changing relationships and the power shifts that occur during
the one-act play.
Inevitably, the meeting over a
schoolyard fight leads to violence, which provides a catharsis of sorts, and
concludes with the four adults emotionally drained, left to contemplate the
damage they have wrought, the truths that have been revealed, and to face the
uncomfortable question uttered by Michael in the play’s final line: “What do we
know?”
This tidy, often trenchant production
has many humorous moments, but the laughter is tinged with a certain amount of discomfort
for it doesn’t take long to realize that what we are laughing at are our own
foibles, shibboleths, hypocrisies and neatly constructed “civilized” personas.
"Now this is the law of the
jungle, as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the wolf that shall break it must die.” – Rudyard Kipling
“God of Carnage” runs weekends
through Nov. 22. For tickets or more information call 203-655-5414 or go to
www.darienarts.org.
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