opening weekend review: god of carnage @ le petit theatre

Your fiends and neighbors: God of Carnage @ Le Petit Theatre
Review by Paul Oswell

Rhetoric, accusations, and various liquids are all airborne in Yasmina Reza's lauded God of Carnage (playing at Le Petit Theatre through May 17th). A Broadway sensation and Tony Award winner following its 2009 debut, it’s a single-act powder keg. Two couples engage in an escalating war of ethics that lays bare the self-interest lurking beneath bourgeois parenthood, and exposes the brittleness of human empathy.

Alan (Conrad Ricamora) and Annette (Julie Lake) are guests in the Brooklyn home of Veronica (Marie Lovejoy) and Michael (Joshua Mark Sienkiewicz), there to discuss an incident between their 11-year-old children. Alan and Annette's boy has attacked Veronica and Michael's son with a stick, dislodging two teeth in the process.

We begin with polite, if emotionally wary, cooperation. Alan and Annette emanate a cynically corporate, materialistic ethos as they navigate Veronica and Michael's more bohemian, everyman sensibilities. Michael, a purveyor of kitchen and bathroom fittings, appears to be an almost cartoonishly easy-going husband, while Alan repeatedly abandons the discussion, loudly addressing an escalating company matter on his cell phone. 

Minor quibbles about the precise wording of a legal statement soon metastasize, and masks slip as social cohesion strains against the pressures of self-interest, lubricated by an open bottle of rum.

The cast deftly navigates the emotional whiplash as hostility mounts. Ricamora juggles manipulation and fraying control, while Sienkiewicz remains charismatic even as his bonhomie is tested to its breaking point. Marie Lovejoy's Veronica appears superficially the most vulnerable, yet excavates reserves of strength to weather a tornado of aggression. Julie Lake pivots brilliantly between being hilariously indignant and inappropriately amorous before delivering a viscerally emphatic bout of nausea.

A.J. Allegra's direction maintains momentum from the opening moments, and the staging - a sunken lounge overlooked by an imposing work of art - proves striking without overwhelming the action. I won't spoil the pointed visual commentary embedded within the set design, but there's a wickedly effective Easter egg for the observant.

The careening drama may prove uncomfortable viewing for the conflict-averse, and while the themes don't descend to the abyssal depths of, say, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, there are moments of genuine intensity. Marital fissures test both couples, who become privileged adults wielding playground insults with guileless brutality.

That’s possibly the extent of the subtext in God of Carnage. I wondered about, say, a geopolitical metaphor, but Reza says in interviews that it is a straight dramatization of a real-life incident related to her by a friend. You may cringe imagining which awful details are possibly real, but the reassurance of at least some of it being fictional is a positive relief when the confrontation on stage is at its most lurid. 

God of Carnage is playing at Le Petit Theatre through May 17th. Click here for show information and ticketing