God of Carnage Broadway Reviews

Reza's play is brief, barely 85 minutes, but it packs a lot into those increasingly heated exchanges. The actors have expertly tapped into Reza's sense of heightened reality, a reality reflected in the production's stylized, red-carpeted living-room set (courtesy of designer Mark Thompson) framed by a blindingly white proscenium.

A rumble of an altogether different kind takes place in the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s dark and hilarious farce “God of Carnage” (elegantly directed by Matthew Warchus, at the Bernard B. Jacobs), which in Christopher Hampton’s excellent translation has been relocated from Paris to the comfortable upper-middle-class environs of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In a handsomely minimal haute-bourgeois apartment (designed by Mark Thompson), a turf war takes place over a blood-red carpet, a coffee table chockablock with art books, and two elegant glass vases overflowing with white tulips.

Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” with Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden, proves superior entertainment at Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. What a pleasant surprise to share a walloping good time with the audience at this comedy, whose ferocious title paradoxically reinforces the subtly furibund fun.

Examined coldly, this 90-minute play about two couples who meet to discuss a playground fight between two of their children isn’t much more than a sustained Punch and Judy show, dressed to impress with sociological accessories. But there’s a reason that Punch and Judy’s avatars have fascinated audiences for so many centuries in cultural forms low (“The Honeymooners” of 1950s television) and high (Edward Albee’s 1962 drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”). “God of Carnage,” which is poised somewhere in between, definitely delivers the cathartic release of watching other people’s marriages go boom. A study in the tension between civilized surface and savage instinct, this play (which recently won the Olivier Award in London for best new comedy) is itself a satisfyingly primitive entertainment with an intellectual veneer.

Like 'Art,' Reza's globally successful '90s play about male friendship and modern art, this one is a fast-moving extended sketch that's never much deeper than its big-issue smart-talk veneer. But the French playwright - in another of Christopher Hampton's exquisite translations - cannily manipulates social observations that appeal to vast audiences and creates characters that bring out the best in actors.

The marvelously paced production confirms—if confirmation is needed—the Brit Matthew Warchus as a leading director on both sides of the Atlantic. Last season, he breathed glorious new life into what was assumed to be a dead horse with his revival of Boeing-Boeing. (He also directed the original production of Art, among other Reza plays.) But Mr. Warchus’ supreme ensemble of actors in God of Carnage is a particular delight.

With all the anger in the air in these dark days for the nation, there's a certain schadenfreude in watching Yasmina Reza's acid-dipped takedown of smug self-interest in 'God of Carnage.' Examining how the straitjacket of civilized society can barely contain the primitive beast within, the fanged comedy picks an easy target in the complacent bourgeoisie. But the savagery of its dissection of interpersonal politics -- marital, sexual and civic -- is played to perfection by a scorching cast in Matthew Warchus' pungent production.

God of Carnage is the author's most satisfying work since Art (1998), which also balances her very French tendency to jumble philosophy and farce with a surgical dissection of bourgeois pretension and slippery social identity. Matthew Warchus masterfully stages the work, heeding the playwright's command to eschew strict naturalism and embrace the artificial nature of the action. The characters exist as stock types (Daniels as the callous lawyer and Davis as an icy wealth-management consultant), yet the loopier script convulsions allow for ridiculous (and theatrically bracing) psychological leaps.

The conceit of 'God of Carnage' is that Ms. Reza's couples are cut from different bolts of the same cloth. The wives are self-righteous liberals who believe that good will can solve all problems, the husbands thuggish conservatives equally certain (as Mr. Daniels's character puts it) that violence is 'a law of life. . . . People struggle until they're dead.' The point of the play, insofar as it has one, is that the husbands are more or less right: No sooner do the wives start drinking than they shed their bourgeois inhibitions and come out swinging.

Not quite a fully realized play, it's an extended situation comedy featuring two couples meeting to discuss a playground fight between their 11-year-old sons. It seems one of the little boys whacked the other with a stick causing him to lose two teeth. At first, the interaction is civil but there are tensions in the air. It doesn't take long before emotions erupt. And look out. Besides being exceptionally funny, there are several shocking moments in this play that are bound to take you by complete surprise.

Reza's scabrously funny new play, which opened Sunday at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre, is set in the home of Michael and Veronica Novak, seemingly a nice, middle-class couple. The Novaks play host to the more affluent Alan and Annette Raleigh, whose son has bashed their son's teeth in. It's not a typical social visit, but both sets of parents are determined to work out the matter civilly.

But this is a well-crafted playwriting exercise rather than a believable character study. Early on, Reza plants seemingly insignificant details like time bombs, and they explode later with devastating impact. She also knows exactly how to time a joke for maximum reaction, and she cleverly groups and regroups the combatants in different alliances so you don't always know who is on whose side. Kudos also to Christopher Hampton's adaptation from the original French, which transplants the action to tony Park Slope without any noticeable losses in transit. You can see the wiring in this precision machine, but thanks to a stellar cast and impeccable direction by Matthew Warchus, Carnage is a feast for both actors and audience.

The play doesn't really have the heft to sustain its somewhat strained thematic premise. But thanks to witty dialogue and incisive characterizations, it's wonderful fun nonetheless. Matthew Warchus has staged the farcical proceedings to comic perfection, with the physical (and sometimes gross) slapstick humor expertly rendered.

As she did in 'Art,' Reza dissects upper-middle-class foils with precision and a welcome mean streak, but her plays don't amount to all that much once the smoke has cleared. 'God of Carnage' itself boils down to 'Good manners only hide bad problems.' We learn something old every day. Her dramatic devices aren't all that innovative, either puking is a cheap way to get a laugh. It's also a diabolically efficient one, especially in the hands of director Matthew Warchus and his expert cast.

Reza, the Tony-winning French author of “Art,” has skewered middle-class hypocrisy before. She’s also writing here about pentup rage seething beneath daily lives, particularly in a big city like New York. The confrontation unleashes hostilities as ever-shifting alliances form between and among the couples. It’s sort of a “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” meets “Survivor.” Once rum starts flowing, it gets louder, uglier and funnier.

God of Carnage is another of those Yasmina Reza plays that, translated by Christopher Hampton and directed by Matthew Warchus, have become a kind of commercial-theater tic since the team's big success with Art, which at the time looked like a fresh twist on boulevard entertainment. But now, after three or four trips through Reza's sensibility, we know the pattern too well. A premise that generalizes about human beings is started, a counter-premise contradicts it, an attempt at synthesis upsets the apple cart, and back and forth the dramatic ping-pong ball goes. Reza is clever—exceptionally clever, this time around—at inventing little distractions to conceal the pattern from those who don't cotton on quickly, but these sidebars never deepen the basic premise or materially advance the narrative. Human beings are either A or B or an ungainly combination of both, and for her, that's really all there is to it.

So why does God of Carnage, for all its witty anarchy and farcical cheek, feel a little flabby in the gut, a little punch-drunk and glass-jawed—and, even at 85 minutes, a little padded Maybe because it’s all too easy. This fight feels fixed: the punches telegraphed, the reversals rehearsed. The cozy bassinet of gentrified Brooklyn (where child-rearing is art form, fashion statement, and blood sport, all in one) is about as big a bull’s-eye as the boulevard affords. (Reza’s longtime translator, Christopher Hampton, has repatriated the story from a tony Paris arrondissement to Cobble Hill.)

There is much that's resonant to take away from God of Carnage: not only its honest view of the worst inside all of us, but its more focused jabs at cell phone culture, pharmaceutical companies' dishonesty, and inappropriate parenting techniques of various descriptions. But when I left the theatre, I felt that I hadn't seen the play's true potential realized.

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.'