Review - God of Carnage: Screw the Middle Classes! I Will Never Accept Them!

There's a fine, fine line... No, let me rephrase that. There's a wide gaping canyon between clever social commentary and unmotivated slapstick. And while I'm not suggesting that Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage had me longing for the subtle nuances of Messrs. Moe, Larry and Curly I will admit to being reminded of the famous Tallulah Bankhead quip, "There's less to this than meets the eye."

It's a heady little trick the trio of Reza (playwright), Christopher Hampton (translating from her French original) and Matthew Warchus (director) have pulled off before with Art and Life (x) 3, drawing me in with an interesting premise but inevitably leaving me too bored to be disappointed. Here the nemesis of the bourgeoisie (defined in this American version as sensitive female intellectuals and their oafish alpha-male spouses) shows us that no matter how civilized we think we may be, there's always the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom (actually provided by composer Gary Yershon and sound designers Simon Baker/Christopher Cronin) like a voice within us that keeps repeating, "Me, me, me."

Set and costume designer Mark Thompson depicts the Brooklyn living room of Michael and Veronica Novick (James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden) with a free-standing cave-like wall placed in front of a stage-engulfing blood-red backdrop. Books and earth tones are all over the place. Their guests are Alan and Annette Raleigh (Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis), parents of the 11-year-old lad who busted two of the Novick's 11-year-old son's teeth in a playground skirmish. Appropriately, as we'll soon see, the deed was done with that most primitive of weapons, a stick.

Strangers to each other, the two couples go through the niceties of discussing the situation like civilized Brooklynites, though each has their own take on the situation. High-poweRed Lawyer Alan, who spends most of the evening taking calls on his cell, thinks it's just healthy male aggression in action while his wife Hope feels that formal apologies and reparations can cleanly settle the matter. Guy's guy Michael figures the boys can work things out themselves but Veronica, an author and historian sees the event in the same socio-economic terms that led to genocide in Darfur.

And then those darn tom-toms just bring out the ol' primal urges that reduce grown-up outer-boroughers to childish, self-centered animals. It starts with a sly comment here and a nasty retort there, but the next thing you know someone's puking on an out-of-print Oscar Kokoschka catalogue and suddenly, there are no rules!!, leaving no cell phone, tulip arrangement or hamster safe from Reza's plot-manipulating path of destruction. It's too much, too quickly and even at 90 minutes it goes on for far too long.

But Warchus stages the farcical ballet with raucous kineticism and varying rhythms that spark things up a bit and his fully committed cast work admirably as an ensemble; each honing in on specific quirks and mannerisms that fuel their respective meltdowns. Unfortunately, watching the fine craft of the actors on stage is far more interesting than caring about the characters; particularly when it comes to Marcia Gay Harden, whose skills have been reduced to displays of shrillness and athleticism.

With all that said, there's no doubt in my mind that after a successful Broadway run this one-set four-character comedy will be making people laugh in many, many regional and amateur productions for years to come, as there is certainly an audience perfectly eager to pay good money to watch upper middle class snobs beating up on one another. If there wasn't, the National Hockey League would have folded decades ago.

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini, Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels; Bottom: Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, Jeff Daniels and James Gandolfini