In God of Carnage, playwright Yasmina Reza has a fiendish good time stripping her characters of their civilized veneer and revealing what remains of their neanderthal origins. That message is delivered in savagely comic fashion in the latest version of Reza’s 2008 Tony-winning play, which is now running as a visiting production at the Odyssey Theater. No serious L.A. theater-goer should miss it.
Director Peter Allas has cast four skilled actors who bring God of Carnage to life in scintillating fashion, capturing every aspect of their volatile, contradictory characters. Working on Tyler Scrivner’s nifty Brooklyn living-room set, Michael Rubenstone, Jack Esformes, Lisa LoCicero, and Leilani Smith play two married couples facing off against each other over a seemingly trivial issue involving a schoolyard fight between their young sons.
Rubenstone and LoCicero are the hosts, Michael and Veronica Novak, well-off folks whose 11-year-old suffered a broken tooth in the fight. The assailant’s parents, Alan and Annette Raleigh (Esformes and Smith, respectively), have come on a visit to apologize and discuss the case in polite fashion. It doesn’t take long for the politeness to evaporate and for brutishness to take over, with much name-calling, rudeness and violent behavior turning the living-room into a veritable war zone. As a microcosm of mindless, ridiculous human behavior it is all too painfully true.
Not only do the Novaks and Raleighs act like enemies, they begin attacking each other in hysterical fashion, with husband and wife exploding with long-pent-up grievances and resentments. And of course, when their anger is spent and their beastliness subsides, they realize too late what a bunch of pathetic jerks they are.
