Brian Vaughn and Kim Martin-Cotten (Photo by Scott Smelzer/OCR)
Reviewed by Joel Beers
South Coast Repertory
Through March 21
RECOMMENDED
In his program notes to God of Carnage, Jerry Patch, South Coast Repertory’s legendary dramaturge, writes that after the enormous box-office success of playwright Yasmina Reza’s 1995 play Art, “a few critics called her work insubstantial while trying to sound intellectual.”
Those same critics likely thought the same a decade later, when God of Carnage premiered. While the central ideas of these two plays differ — Art examines aesthetics and how we use culture to define ourselves, while Carnage focuses on performance and how we behave when cultural norms collapse — both are less interested in debating ideas than in showing how people use ideas to try to feel superior or control the social dynamic.
But to dismiss Reza’s work as lightweight or pretentious — witty bourgeois characters and language built on elegant premises rather than heavy ideological machinery — is to confuse clarity with shallowness. Her sharp dialogue, tight structure and social comedy that turns savage make the experience visceral and immediate. Reza’s plays may look light on the surface but they cut deep.
Based on this SCR production, directed by Marco Barricelli, God of Carnage’s accessibility is also its weapon. Brutally funny, it holds up a cracked mirror to polite liberal society — not to scold or instruct it but to gleefully watch it shatter.
God of Carnage opens with two sets of well-educated upper-middle-class parents — one a corporate lawyer and wealth manager, the other (slightly lesser affluent) a writer/editor and household goods wholesaler — meeting to discuss a playground altercation between their 11-year-old sons. What begins as a polite reasonable attempt at conflict resolution — complete with fresh tulips, rare art books and some kind of homemade dessert called a clafoutis on the coffee table, and careful language designed not to confront or offend — quickly reveals deep fissures. As the conversation drags on, grievances multiply, alliances shift, the clafoutis turns ugly and small irritations expose larger resentments about parenting, marriage, gender roles and moral superiority.
Once the Homer Simpson Law is invoked (alcohol being the source of and cure for all society’s problems) the adults behave with far less restraint than the children who sparked the meeting. Rational arguments give way to insults, emotional outbursts and petty cruelty. Reza’s play turns into an avalanche in which cultural norms disintegrate under pressure, revealing the thin line between civilized discourse and chaos.
We are watching a train wreck and the fun comes from seeing four outstanding actors peel away their masks of self-righteousness and bourgeois respectability: the earnest, self-righteous writer (Melinda Page Hamilton) who wears her moral convictions like virtuous armor; the slick, calculating corporate lawyer (Brian Vaughn) who wraps his arrogance and paleo-masculinity in the veneer of reason and legal expertise; the wealth manager (Kim Martin-Cotten) who clings to manners as if civility equals virtue; and the household-goods dealer (Dan Donahue) who preens as the voice of common sense. As civility collapses, Reza turns polite liberal posturing into farce, exposing how quickly ideals melt when power, ego and alcohol get involved.
While Vaughn and Martin-Cotten — also seen playing George and Martha in SCR’s repertory production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — are getting a lot of attention, here it’s Donahue’s character that stands out. Donahue, who starred in a fantastic production of One Man, Two Guvnors at SCR a decade ago, is the kind of actor who can’t help but be funny. Physically, he’s all angles, bent elbows and knees, jabbing arms and legs; even his shifting facial expressions are a riot, making his caustic fusillade against the idea of having children, delivered while sitting, endlessly entertaining.
His performance also ultimately shifts the axis of the play. Though his character has the least intellectual career — a household-goods dealer whose life revolves around buying and selling objects — he is the only one not shaken by the destruction of possessions, whether it be cell phones, precious art books or purse contents. Still, by the play’s end, he appears the most exhausted, revealing a weariness and vulnerability that the other characters certainly embody but one that feels more enervating
He’s lost, or has recognized, something deeper in his descent into chaos — a journey that winds up grounding that chaos not just in the absurdity of civility but in the human cost of its collapse.
South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. In repertory with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Wed. 7 p.m., Thurs.-Fri., 7:30 p.m.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 1 & 7 p.m.; thru March 21. Scr.org. Running time: approximately one hour and 10 minutes with no intermission.
