'GOD OF CARNAGE' IS HIT AND MISS

Two Tony Award-winning plays by notable French playwright Yasmina Reza are on stage in Boston through February 5. God of Carnage, a recent Broadway hit also released this month as a major motion picture, is sending caustic barbs sailing through the Huntington’s BU Theatre, while ART, a more introspective yet still at times ferocious play, is holding court on the New Rep’s main stage at the Arsenal Center for the Arts inWatertown.

Both take an unromantic look at relationships and humanity. Carnage centers on two upscale urban couples whose thin layers of civility disintegrate into childish brutality over the course of an evening of alcohol-fueled confrontation, while ART probes the hurtful and dysfunctional co-dependence of three long-time male friends. Both are, at times, bitingly funny. Yet neither is completely satisfying as a work of theater.

GOD OF CARNAGE

Written by Yasmina Reza; translated by Christopher Hampton; directed by Daniel Goldstein; scenic design, Dane Laffrey; costume design, Charles Schoonmaker; lighting design, Tyler Micoleau; sound design, Brett R. Jarvis

Cast in order of appearance:

Veronica Novak, JohAnna Day; Alan Raleigh, Brooks Ashmanskas; Michael Novak, Stephen Bogardus; Annette Raleigh, Christy Pusz

Performances:

Now through February 5, Huntington Theatre Company, BU Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston. Tickets available at the Box Office, by calling 617-266-0800, or online at www.huntingtontheatre.org.

There’s no disputing that God of Carnage, a 2010 Tony Award winner that was a box office bonanza when original cast members Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini, Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels starred and sparred, serves up many wicked laughs – the kind of nervous, “I can’t believe they said that” laughs that touch some deeply primal human core normally buried beneath good manners and polite breeding. Yet, for all its speeches about anthropology, nature vs. nurture, responsibility, and the power of our basest human instincts, God of Carnage is a very thin play. Once the point is made that we are all animals under the skin, not much else is explored.

Couples Veronica and Michael Novak (Johanna Day and Stephen Bogardus) and Alan and Annette Raleigh (Brooks Ashmanskas and Christy Pusz) come together - at first cordially - to discuss a resolution to a schoolyard brawl between their sons Henry and Benjamin. Soon polite but superficial repartee disintegrates into blame, name-calling, and even physical attacks that the couples experience as simultaneously shocking and cathartic. Apparently we all just need to let loose once in a while and let the Neanderthal inside run free. Throughout the course of the evening, the husbands and wives alternately bond with and take sides against each other depending upon the issue at hand. In the end, no one’s the better or wiser. They’ll just continue to slog along the best they can, hopefully without inflicting too much damage on their children in the process.

In the early going, the Huntington quartet seems uncomfortable with their characters, awkwardly forcing the social pleasantries and missing the beats in the dialog. Ashmanskas, especially, gives his incessant phone conversations an oddly broad delivery as if he’s orating to the audience instead of orchestrating highly sensitive damage control for a troubled pharmaceutical client. However, as the play turns less civil and the fur begins to fly, the cast settles into a rhythm and their individual personalities take shape.

As with the Broadway production, the women are more sharply defined, and their deterioration into barbarism is more extreme and more comical. Day’s fall from grace is perhaps the most shocking and tragic because Veronica above all others cherishes the differences between civilized beings and the primitive cultures she studies. Day succeeds in making Veronica irritating and sympathetic at the same time. Pusz, in contrast, brings delightful lightheadedness to her repressed (and oppressed) Annette. So afraid is she to say poop if she had a mouthful, she wages an actual physical war with herself, trying desperately to hold back the bile (literally) that, once released, frees her to speak heretofore unuttered truths – and to trash the stage in a comic rage that leaves everyone, including the audience, stunned.

The men have less distance to travel in their descent, since they find common ground early on when they show pride in their sons’ violent playground antics. They also have less opportunity to gain sympathy, since their characters are a bit more one dimensional. Bogardus as the successful working stiff Michael – ill at ease with his wife’s constant desire to make him over into someone more respectable – initially appears, well, too respectable. Once he doffs his suit jacket, untucks his shirt, and breaks out the cigars and brandy, however, it’s as if the gloves come off and he’s ready to rumble. Ashmanskas, always the gifted physical comedian, gets laughs by wrestling with a bean bag chair and by becoming the perfect deadpan foil at times for Pusz’s, shall we say, explosive idiosyncrasy.

Reza hammers home her point about man’s inhumanity to man – and animals – any number of times. It is to director Daniel Goldstein’s and the cast’s great credit that they keep the physical business and farcical elements building to a fever pitch until finally, at evening’s end, they have nothing left to throw at each other but the white flag.

Dane Laffrey’s scenic design of black, white, yellow, Plexiglass and chrome seems to suggest a cross between an urban beehive and a house in which no one should be allowed to throw stones. His almost miniature straight-backed living room chairs, the aforementioned bean bag, and stacks of neatly piled reference books suggest a schoolroom that infantilizes its adult inhabitants and guests. Tyler Micoleau’s lighting is an unsubtle bright white (all the better to study the quirks of this strange tribal culture called parents), and Charles Schoonmaker’s layers of shirts, blouses, sweaters, suit jackets, scarves and ties enable the actors to move from buttoned up civility to unfettered rage.

Perhaps our urban jungles feed the isolation that triggers conflict more easily than conversation. It seems that in God of Carnage Reza has created four characters desperate for meaningful human contact but unable to get past the instinct for fight or flight. A deeper exploration of what makes these lost souls tick might have turned a scathing but ultimately superficial comedy into a penetrating and memorable work of art.

PHOTOS BY T. Charles Erickson: Stephen Bogardus as Michael, Brooks Ashmanskas as Alan, Christy Pusz as Annette, and JohAnna Day as Veronica; Brooks Ashmanskas; JohAnna Day and Christy Pusz; Christy Pusz; Christy Pusz and Brooks Ashmanskas

NEXT UP: Review of New Rep’s ART

 

 

 

 

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