From left, Gabe Fazio is Michael, Carey Cox is Annette, David Burtka is Alan, and Christiane Noll is Veronica in Yasmina Reza’s 2009 black comedy God of Carnage.
The veneer of civilization is thinner than one hopes for in Yasmina Reza’s 2009 Tony-winning black comedy God of Carnage, admirably revived by Theater Breaking Through Barriers. The set-up is simple. Two couples are meeting after Benjamin, the 11-year-old son of one couple, hit Henry, the son of the other, with a stick and damaged two teeth. Henry’s parents, Michael and Veronica Novak (Gabe Fazio and Christiane Noll), pressured him to reveal Benjamin’s name, and they have invited Benjamin’s parents, Annette and Alan Raleigh (Carey Cox and David Burtka) to their well-appointed home to exchange “statements” about the incident.
Michael and Alan, the husband who’s not interested in discussing his child’s misbehavior.
The exchange of “statements” is an amusing conceit, but also a warning that the meeting is bound to be fraught with tension. Reza skillfully peppers the script with seeming small talk, but the innocuous references turn out to be time bombs, and director Nicholas Viselli makes sure they all go off on cue.
At first the bumps the parents encounter are small. Noll’s grimly serious Veronica reads the Novaks’ summary, but right away Veronica’s use of the word armed, as in “armed with a stick,” rubs Alan, a chauvinistic, hard-charging corporate lawyer, the wrong way. They settle on furnished.
Gradually the four principals, trying to behave high-mindedly, find their masks of civility falling away and themselves sliding down a long, slippery slope studded with bumps. It’s no help that Alan takes repeated cell phone calls from a Big Pharma client about a crisis over a possibly dangerous medication. Although the satire on cell-phone addiction has become stale, Burtka handles it with brisk efficiency.
One of the smaller crises involves clafouti—“my own little recipe,” says Veronica. It mixes apples and pears, and Annette shows her appreciation with “Apples and pears, this is a first.” Still, the dessert proves a catalyst that later points to Veronica’s controlling nature and possible friction with her mother-in-law:
Alan: So the clafouti, it’s your mother’s?
Michael: The recipe is my mother’s, but Ronnie made this one.
Veronica: Your mother doesn’t mix pears and apples!
Fazio as Michael tries to connect with Cox as Annette. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
Michael’s mother may lack boldness in her baking, but she plays her part in the evening too, telephoning from a hospital where she’s undergoing tests and doctors have put her on a Big Pharma product that Michael (thanks to Alan’s phone calls) knows too much about.
Fazio has the juiciest role as Michael, a placid liberal who tries to ameliorate every tension with an aphorism, and he plays it with comically off-kilter earnestness: “What I always say is, you can’t control the things that control you” is one mantra he spouts. Another is: “What I always say is, we’re a lump of potter’s clay, and it’s up to us to fashion something out of it.” But Michael’s own behavior with his daughter’s pet hamster leaves him open to attack:
Michael: I find it incomprehensible to be called a killer! In my own home!
Veronica: What’s your home got to do with it?
Michael: My home, the doors of which I have opened, the doors of which I have opened wide in a spirit of reconciliation, to people who ought to be grateful to me for it!
Alan: It’s wonderful the way you keep patting yourself on the back.
Alliances shift, as wives turn against husbands, then join spouses, only to lash out again. Pretty soon it’s a free-for-all. Annette is at Alan’s throat for his cell-phone usage—“Drives me crazy, that cell phone, endlessly!” And Veronica is berating her husband for his lack of support:
Michael and Veronica try to dry out an art book that a guest has vomited on, in God of Carnage.
Michael: You’re blowing things out of proportion.
Veronica: I don’t give a shit! You force yourself to rise above petty-mindedness … and you finish up humiliated and completely on your own.”
The actors embrace their characters with a seriousness that can only make their behavior funnier. Noll, who has brightened many a musical, inhabits Veronica’s pinched personality wholeheartedly. Cox’s Annette, at first sidelined by her illness, jumps back into the fray with a vengeance. Burtka has the least colorful role, but he keeps the tension high as one waits for him to put aside his indifference and unleash his anger as the others indulge themselves.
The seemingly high-minded Michael provides the best summary of the evening as he eventually drops his mask of liberalism and declares, “What I always say is, marriage: the most terrible ordeal God can inflict on you.”
The Theater Breaking Through Barriers production of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage plays through May 20 at Theatre Row (410 West 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday and at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Matinees are at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit tbtb.org.
Playwright: Yasmina Reza
Direction: Nicholas Viselli
Sets: Bert Scott
Lights & Projections: Samuel J. Biondolillo
Costumes: Olivia V. Hern
