On a playground, Annette and Alan’s admittedly “savage” son hit and knocked out two teeth from Veronica and Michael’s probably provocative son. To their red, tulip-bedecked Brooklyn home, Veronica has called a parents’ meeting to agree on what, if necessary, to “call the incident in a legal statement” and, by implication, whether there should be some kind of contrition, punishment, or effort to bring the boys together in a more civilized context.
It’s soon apparent that, subbing for their kids, the parents’ own civility will decline. Veronica, who writes of arts and cultural history, is a self-righteous moralist. A household supplies wholesaler, Michael has gone out of his way to make their home reflect her good taste and welcome the other couple.
Alan, a hotshot corporate lawyer, is an expert on cover-ups, which constant calls on his cell phone urge him to effect. He’d have liked to get the meeting over with near its start, to keep his firm and himself wealthier. Holding apprehensiveness “in” while outwardly calm about all but Alan’s phone mania, “wealth manager” Annette develops a nervous attack that makes her vomit. Not only Veronica’s big red rug and precious coffee table books get a hit. Alan expresses a cynical view of her latest cause, Darfur. Conflicts intensify in turns between the couples, each man and his wife, the men and the women.
Through derogations on to actual physical violence, they all scrape away their veneer of civilization. The acid opinions they’ve dropped find ultimate expression in Michael’s claim: “Marriage is the most terrible ordeal God can inflict on you” in which the children you’ve nourished destroy you. (This also explains the play’s title.)
Despite the lack of doors, the play has the essential elements of farce: humor (however biting), frustrations of aims, peeling away surface appearances, and the necessity of people who should not meet . . . meeting. And not just any people but rather ones who are pretentious (like Veronica) or insecure (like Annette and Michael) or cheating (like Alan). To what end? Certainly not comedy’s traditional lucky or happy ending or union of friends, families, lovers.
Much in God of Carnage depends on timing. Director Greg Lemming gets this from his actors at every emotional and physical turn. Although the Mertz lacks the intimacy of what I think would be a better, more compact space, the play is blocked for maximum activity that can be seen and heard well. (And to makes the projectile vomiting less dangerous.)
Always a provocateur, Kate Hampton’s Veronica dominates throughout, not easy when James Clarke’s formidable Alan proves he can outshout but keep his cool better, his own kind of provocation. At first laid back as Annette, Katie Cunningham makes an effectively nerve-wracked transition to final screaming accusations and self-assertion.
Michael is the only one who might deserve sympathy, and I have a hunch that in Reza’s original French play, his social standing and background would have more clearly contributed to latitude being afforded him. He’s scorned for putting his daughter’s hamster in fatal cold, not pitied for the phobia that caused his act. However hard he tries to be a good host and husband, as David Breitbarth keeps reminding, Michael is uncomfortable in this class-conscious meeting. He even finds out Alan’s involvement with a product that might hurt Michael’s own mother! What can he do but revert to rolled up shirt sleeves and loud takeover?
Judy Gailen’s costumes well reflect each person’s status, but the huge patterned center backdrop doesn’t seem to go with the otherwise tastefully understated front room. Again, size matters. Lighting by Dan Kotloqitz does, too, as it follows the tones of the dialogue.
Kate Hampton, Katie Cunningham, David Breitbarth and James Clarke.
