Nobody reported hearing a giant sucking sound over Seattle Center recently, but there must’ve been one—between the asinine A Doctor in Spite of Himself currently playing at Intiman Theatre (read the review at thestranger.com) and the relentlessly vapid God of Carnage next door at Seattle Repertory Theatre, the neighborhood seems to have experienced a sudden, catastrophic brain drain.

So. The jig’s up, Yasmina Reza. You’re a menace to your profession. Your most popular plays, like Art and Carnage (which won a Tony Award in 2009—what the fuck were those people thinking?), are what’s wrong with theater. Everything that happens in the 90 minutes of Carnage could have been distilled into two minutes that might have made an interesting first scene. On its own, Carnage is nothing.

I would announce a spoiler alert, but there is nothing to spoil: Two couples meet in a white, condo-looking living room to discuss how the young son of the home team (liberal, working-middle class, dressed in earth tones) got smacked in the face by the young son of the visiting team (acerbic, rich, dressed in power blacks). By the end of their long argument, during which nothing is resolved and nothing is revealed, one of the power-blacks has gotten drunk, thrown a bunch of tulips on the floor, and shouted. You will notice a parallel with Art. Both plays are built of the dullest people saying the dullest things about the dullest subjects (in Art: “What is art?”; in Carnage: “Aren’t people inherently selfish and territorial?”), punctuated with a meaningless act of violence to an inanimate object (in Art, a painting; in Carnage, a bouquet).

You could read Carnage as a commentary on class—poorer people have a sense of accountability and consequences; richer people do not—but even that gives the play more credit than it’s worth. The entirety of its contents can be summed up in an old joke that’s popular among the Southern women in my family: Two debutantes, Nancy and Debbie, are talking. (Imagine the following in soft, almost breathy Southern accents.) Nancy: “My daddy gave me a Cadillac for Christmas.” Debbie: “Thaaas nice.” Nancy: “My daddy is taking me to Paris for vacation.” Debbie: “Thaaas nice.” Nancy: “My daddy bought me the most expensive dress for my coming-out party.” Debbie: “Thaaas nice.” Nancy: “What’d your daddy get you?” Debbie: “My daddy sent me to finishing school.” Nancy: “Finishing school? What’s that?” Debbie: “Finishing school is where you learn to say ‘Thaaas nice’ instead of ‘Fuck you.'”

Boom. Done. That’s the play.

To be fair, the audience at the performance I attended absolutely adored God of Carnage. Nobody seemed to mind that there was, in fact, no carnage, other than the violated tulips and actress Bhama Roget shooting a long stream of chalky-white vomit from her mouth, Exorcist-­style, to break the tedium of the dialogue. Roget had just been consuming clafouti and coffee. So why was her barf so pale and liquid? Because Yasmina Reza couldn’t write a moving and true moment, not even a moment involving voluminous amounts of special-effects barf, if her life were on the line.

The most profound mystery about God of Carnage isn’t why it’s 90 minutes of nothing besides a single repetition of Hobbesian anxiety—that beneath a thin veneer of civilization, we’re all selfish brutes—but its effect on its audience. Why do people like this play? Is it because they lead extraordinarily boring lives?

Ultimately, that question belongs to sociologists and the pimps at CBS who peddle Two and a Half Men—they’re the experts on dullardry. As for the actors, all of whom have done great work in the past—Roget, Hans Altwies, Stranger Genius Amy Thone, Denis Arndt—congratulations on the paycheck. And it’s nice to see you having some fun up there, getting all frothy over conversations and arguments that (textually speaking) have zero traction and zero stakes. Your characters all clearly hate each other, and yet we can see the front door throughout the whole play. How could Reza think none of you would just leave the room? Did your director, Wilson Milam—who has directed some stellar productions at the Rep, including The Seafarer and Glengarry Glen Ross—never ask the question? If so, the answer is not evident.

On one hand, I feel like I’ve just kicked a puppy: The play means well. On the other hand, its idea of “means well” is “asks you to pay tens of dollars so it can urinate on your trouser leg.” Maybe that puppy deserves a boot in the ass after all. recommended

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

23 replies on “God of Garbage”

  3. Ah, yes- and this review is EXACTLY why I don’t read reviews. All they want is to be sent into orbit by something they’ve never seen before, never thought about before, never been done before. But of course, that rarely happens so of course the play is shit, the movie sucks, the music is toneless. Why do reviewers still exist? Because, unfortunately, just like stories about the Paris Hilton’s of the world people still read them.

    Please go find a new career…

  4. Actually, Brendan, I have good news (well… for you, at least): A Doctor In Spite of Himself actually closed on October 10. BTW I actually loved that show… I’m guessing from your unkind review that you’re not a fan of the work of Jacques LeCoq. I can see why people would hate it… Doctor strikes me as one of those “You either love it or you hate it” shows.

    I’m planning to see God of Carnage Sunday, and though I’ll consider your words with an open mind, I’ll also watch the show with an open mind. I’m genuinely curious as to whether this is an excessively scathing review, or right on the mark.

  5. Brendan is right on the money. Harsh, but accurate.

    I saw this in New York a year ago in May. The cast was Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, and James Gandolfini. The audience (except for me) loved it.

    Here, again, the cast is excellent, everything about it is excellent.

    Except for the script.

    The emperor has no clothes.

  6. A play doesn’t have to be in the “epically great” category for a production to be loads of fun, so long as the team is inventive, and this is the case with “God of Carnage” at Seattle Rep. What could have been a stale, talky bitch-fest instead pops with energy and ingenuity. It’s an anarchic calamity of the first order, where the adult capacities of forethought, self-censorship and passivity are transmogrified into instantaneous rebuttal, rage, and hurt feelings.

    The scenario is simple enough: Two boys have had a tooth-cracking playground melee, and the parents have come together to sort things out. Things are bound to go south, and they do, with psychic bloodshed that is much worse than the physical.

    Much of the energy comes from director Wilson Milam’s fluid and endless rearrangement of personnel as they debate degrees of guilt and innocence, first in regard to their boys, then in regard to one another. The spectacularly three-dimensional, Meier-esque set by Eugene Lee allows for plenty of dynamic movement as the actors distance themselves from one another, eavesdrop, or selectively ignore somebody. (It’s also much more interesting than the set of the recent Broadway run.)

    The director’s dictum seems to have been that dialogue should always be treated as a pair of magnets, with the battlers either snapping together or lunging apart. And if anybody stays in one place for long they’d better have a damn good reason. To cry, for instance, which Amy Thone does twice to great effect, once with a broadly comic edge and once again to show just how ugly things have gotten. The button-pushing and bloodletting between Thone and her stage husband (Hans Altwies, quite often literally red with anger) is so acute that you can’t help wonder if she’s suffered similar cock fights with her real husband (who also happens to be Hans Altwies). This adds a wonderful squirm factor to the proceedings.

    Denis Arndt and Bhama Roget do battle with clipped silences that indicate an entirely different balance of power. Their generational age difference, not specified in the text, adds another dimension to the sexual gamesmanship. Geographic alterations to the text, placing the action in Seattle instead of Paris, are also a lot of fun.

    A year and a half ago Ben Brantley’s review in the New York Times said that “on the page the play doesn’t amount to much.” This is this is exact impression I had in reading it. The play is essentially an exercise in shifting alliances and instantly re-ordered priorities. Absent the ideological rules of formal politics the warring couples are free to do the forbidden: change one’s mind about leaving something unsaid. This they do, about every five minutes. Perhaps Reza meant this as a parody of French intellectual café tradition, where the use of language itself fuels perpetual reevaluation and self-contradiction. Apparently a laugh-free delivery was enough to entertain the French and the Germans. Without the comic energy of this production it would not be a bad play, simply a very different one, a play that takes its ideas perhaps just a bit too seriously.

    Reza has expressed more than a little displeasure in the fact that British and American audiences have laughed their asses off, as though we have ignored her intentions. This is unfortunate, because all the humor seems perfectly organic to the script. Thank god the Rep has actors who understand this, and are able to launch this “discourse” into a fully fledged rhubarb without ever mugging for laughs. A single extraordinary stage effect (which I hope you haven’t already read about) is the only – probably unnecessary – pratfall.

    It has been widely speculated that Reza’s English translator, Christopher Hampton, is entirely responsible for making GOC funny, or even interesting. I believe that cooler heads should prevail, and give Reza 99% of the authorial credit for the end result. It is a testament to her skill that she has created a work that is, simply put, translatable and adaptable across cultures and oceans. The underlying schematic of warfare and dissolution is entirely her own. I think if she came to the Bagley Wright she just might be able to fully enjoy what she has accomplished.

  7. I agree with Brendan that this play presents nothing of consequence. The title–among many other things–doesn’t serve the play well, or audience expectations for that matter.

    But the play is not offensive. It has flaws, but it isn’t so poorly written. It simply demands little of the audience and less of itself. Isn’t that the case for the large majority of entertainments out there?

    I often expect more of the performing arts so I too get annoyed when they fail to deliver. But lately I’ve been thinking, “If a movie can be light entertainment, why can’t a play?” Do plays always have to MEAN something? Why isn’t it acceptable for a play to simply provide good performances (which there were here), entertaining scenarios, and some good dialogue. That’s more than most movies and TV if you ask me. I’m a little conflicted still on this point; haven’t totally sold myself even. But still: why are people so inflexible when it comes to the performing arts and so forgiving when it comes to TV and movies?

    This play had no emotional catharsis; it opened no one’s eyes; it changes no lives; it had flawed characters (in the writing, not their humanity–a lawyer so willingly concedes the guilt & responsibility of their kid? please); and it didn’t expand our understanding of the art form. As for winning awards, okay, that’s ridiculous. But I bet just about everyone who saw this play the same night I did said to themselves, “Well, it was pretty fun. I’d go to a play here again sometime.” Which, let’s face it, is a greater accomplishment than many plays can boast.

  10. Brendan —

    Yasmina Reza didn’t write the consistency of the vomit. The edition of the script at Elliott Bay just says “vomit.” The choice you note was probably made by the designer. Maybe the director.

    One thing you’re not good at, is discerning who makes what contribution to a production.

  11. One note I take from this article as I think about it is that much of Brendan’s issue with the production is with the written play itself, rather than the performance. Most critical minds fail to discern between the two… while both team together to create a single impression in a single production, both are separate elements, and to blame the cast/direction/crew for the flaws of the playwright’s work isn’t necessarily fair.

    Maybe Seattle Rep could have chosen a better play to produce. But a big thing I notice about this review is that I have no idea how the performances were, because Brendan devoted nearly 100% of his review towards a fraction of this production.

  12. @7 – A play absolutely can be “light entertainment”. However, in order to qualify, it must be *entertaining*, which it sounds like this wasn’t.

    We charge more for theatre tickets than Hollywood does for movie tickets (another problem in and of itself), which inherently puts the onus on the play to be entertaining, moving, surprising — anything but mediocre. There’s enough mediocrity accepted in theatre; let’s not make allowances.

    @3 – as someone who performs in, directs, and occasionally writes plays, I perpetually seek to do something that’s never been seen, never been thought, never been done; it’s rarely achieved, but not an unreasonable goal for audiences of artists or artists of themselves. Why applaud sameness and (again) mediocrity? What would be the point?

  13. This review couldn’t be more off base. The play is entertaining, well paced, and well acted. Do yourself a favor and buy a ticket. You won’t regret the 90 minutes spent with play.

  14. So I saw it. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I also got to see it for free. If I paid $30-40 to see this, I might have been pissed.

    I can see what frustrated Brendan, to his credit: The play breaks no new ground, and simply serves as a marginally enhanced sort of disposable entertainment you could get from a movie or fringe production for a fraction of the price.

    Yes, it strives to be nothing more than absurdist comedy. It was still pretty funny, Hans, Amy, Bhama and Denis had great energy and timing, and it seems like the paying audience mostly liked it. And I guess as long as most of the audience walks out happy, Seattle Rep couldn’t care less about the play’s actual artistic impact.

    In the short term, it’s no big deal. And in the long term, it adds nothing to the community’s canon. I’ll be surprised if this production’s on any of these actors’ resumes in five years, even though all of them did some great work here.

  15. “A play doesn’t have to be in the “epically great” category for a production to be loads of fun.”

    This is the quality over content argument that all of Seattle’s Big houses have staked their existence on. It’s a close cousin to the “fineness over freshness” argument. A good friend who also happens to be a senior artistic staffer at one of the Bigs once said to me, “Paul, I honestly believe that if we just do good work as well as we can people will come see it.”

    Horseshit.

    We need fresh, spectacular “epically great” content to win the new audiences it will take for these behemoths we’ve built to survive. GOD OF CARNAGE is just so much more fiddling while their own well appointed houses burn.

  17. A bunch of pretentious wasps arguing in a room for an hour and a half. Great performances, but who the fuck wants to see that. Brenden is quite right in his summary. “Well polished turd.”

  18. I agree. I agree so much it’s painful. Do people actually think this play is good? The actors did their best. I just wish the writer had.

  19. Several words in favor of “Gods of Carnage”.

    1. For Christ’s sake, Brandon. It’s a fucking comedy. It does not purport to be anything else. Viewed in that light, its cardinal sin seems to be that it’s less inclined to take itself seriously than you are.

    2. It is beautifully acted. From start to finish. Every single fucking minute is pure comic precision. Unlike “A Doctor in Spite of Himself”, in which the actors never tired of mugging, these actors create a universe that, as far as they’re concerned, ends at the edge of the stage. It _is_ well-polished. At least, our fustian little reviewer got it half right.

    3. For someone less given to clearing his throat, this play is deliciously entertaining.

    Is it a masterpiece? Of course not. But in the context of this city’s decidedly second-rate theater seen, these are uncommonly good performances.

    Honestly, Brandon, this is a half-assed piece of criticism. Not merely because it doesn’t accord with my view of the play, but because there is nothing to learn from it. It is a stream of petulance that by a man whose disapproval appears to arise not from elevated taste but from a surly temper.

  21. @12– SOME theatres charge way more than movies. Seattle Rep, ACT, Intiman all bleed the audience of all the cash they can, so your point is relevant to those three. But looking more broadly, there are many theatres in this town that charge between 10 – 20 for a ticket. Plus there’re usually half-off specials, pay what you will shows, etc. Seeing a movie at 8pm these days costs about 12 or 14 bucks. More if you’re seeing IMAX or 3-D. And did you notice, all theater is in 3-D! Plus, you decide this doesn’t fit entertainment but you haven’t seen it. Simple fail.

  23. After the Rep’s stellar 09-10 season, ‘Carnage’ was a big let-down for me, although I really don’t fault the Rep for that (aside from their choosing to do the show in the first place.) I think this review is pretty spot on… it’s a pretty worthless show unless you like watching upper crust types puking inexplicably and behaving like bi-polar monkeys. I’m actually kind of really (and apparently non-committally) surprised that Roman Polanski (???) is directing the upcoming film adaptation…

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