God of Carnage

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The producers of Yasmina Reza's Tony Award-winning play God of Carnage, now in its second year at Broadway's Bernard Jacobs Theatre, are doing a nice job of keeping the laugh-filled dark comedy fresh and the box office hopping by periodically overhauling the cast. Fortunately, the latest quartet -- Dylan Baker, Jeff Daniels, Lucy Liu, and Janet McTeer -- proves to be another doozy.



In this hilarious look at two marriages that come apart over a tiff that the two couples' grade-school sons have had, it initially seems as if Liu as the somewhat mousy Annette might be a weak link. But by the end of the slow and amusing disintegration of civility, Liu has triumphant moments with a pesky cell [...]

No matter what you think of French playwright Yasmina Reza's astonishingly commercial drawing-room dramedies, one thing must be happily conceded: She creates characters that actors love to tackle. That's certainly true of God of Carnage, the Tony Award-winning play now at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre with Christine Lahti, Annie Potts, Jimmy Smits, and Ken Stott, who have recently taken over the leads.

Perhaps it's not entirely surprising that this new foursome is just as hilariously and woundingly effective as their celebrated predecessors. Each of them patently relishes the chance to chew the red-for-anger scenery Mark Thomson has provided with its slash of a parched-earth wall and two vases[...]

There are several things wrong with Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, in which two upscale Brooklyn couples get together to ease the friction caused when the 11-year-old son of one couple knocked two teeth from the mouth of the other couple's 11-year-old son. But almost none of those flaws ultimately matters much, because the soigne yet knockabout comedy at the Bernard B. Jacobs is simply too entertaining from fade-in to inconclusive fade-out, especially as sleekly translated by Reza's usual go-to guy, Christopher Hampton, well directed by Matthew Warchus, and beautifully performed by four top-drawer actors -- Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini, and Marcia Gay Harden -- all of whom kno[...]