Nothing says ‘welcome back to live theatre’ like watching four-grown adults devolve over the course of 90-minutes into childish selfishness and chaotic dark humors. Finally reopening its doors after an almost two-year darkness, The Vagabond Players usher in their 106th season with Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage. Directed by Stephen Deininger, this curious and enigmatic story showcases the simplistic nature of humanity— childhood never truly ends and all your problems can be solved by shouting, name-calling, and throwing things.
The play itself, originally written in French by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton, has a strangely ephemeral timelessness to it, despite being written with ‘present day’ settings over 15 years ago. It’s poignant and provocative, a darkly humored exploration of four adults— two married couples— attempting to mitigate a playground brawl between their 11-year-old sons. The events take place in the living room of one of the couples, the children are referenced but never seen, and the whole ordeal is spiked with moments of chaos, calamity, and colorful language and scenarios that will make you think, if not make you laugh.
Set Designer Moe Conn and Stephen Deininger have crafted an elegant scene, painted in a rich and vibrant burning-sunset-shade of orange. It’s a modern living room, dappled with symbols of affluence and culture. The room reeks ever so slightly of pretention and this serves the play’s overall setup well. The set is tastefully festooned with art and artifacts, while bottles upon bottles of wine are stacked up on the lowest shelves, subtly foreshadowing at the inherent disfunction of the couple that inhabit the house. Conn and Deininger do an excellent job of creating one of those rooms that isn’t really lived in, but rather used to entertain guests and showcase assets but is otherwise a dust-collector when company has departed. This notion gives the set an extra element of liveliness, which further engages the audience with the play.
Acting as a hidden fifth character, the aural landscape of the play is one of the production’s most striking features. Sound Designer Stuart Kazanow creates a perpetually tense atmosphere, aligning perfectly with playwright Yasmina Reza’s dramatic overtones and director Stephen Deininger’s approach to the piece. There is the ever-present ticking of a clock permeating the background. It’s louder in some scenes, more subtle in others, but it’s always there. The entire play reads like one massive, pressurized bomb waiting to go off and the constant ticking of the clock is a reminder that it could blow like a powder keg at any moment. In addition to this striking feature, Kazanow includes a plethora of identifiable noises in his diegetic soundscape— the F train rumbling by, generalized city-noise like cop cars and traffic, the espresso machine going when one of the characters goes off to the kitchen to make coffee— all of these little touches bring the reality of this play one step closer to the audience, making theatergoers a unique fly-on-the-wall in the Novak living room.
The play itself is loaded with awkward moments, mostly in the intentional pauses of how these couples attempt to dance all around the awkwardness of the situation at hand. Director Stephen Deininger has masterfully milked the most out of these pauses, putting everyone just a little bit more on edge, which ultimately helps the characters gain momentum as the play progresses towards its chaotic conclusion. There are a few moments, mostly minor, when fast-flying insults or biting exchanges between two couples could be more tightly delivered and with a greater sense of urgency, but they are infrequent and easily forgiven by the more helter-skelter moments when the proverbial poop hits the fan. Deininger showcases his directorial skill when it comes to building up moments— particularly unspoken ones or ones that rely heavily on subtext— between the pairings (of which there are six variations across the four characters.) This skill makes for a bunch of extra enjoyable hilarity where the audience is concerned.
Taking up the role of ‘the visiting wife’ Annette Riley, Elena Gray Huang is slightly slower coming into her own compared to the other three performers on stage, but this feels to be mostly intentional and aligned with the façade and forced-politeness of the character. There are times when it’s hard to hear Huang, and a bit more projection when using her conversational voice would not go amiss, but when it’s time for her character to really put it out there about how she feels in certain moments, you definitely hear and see every bit of that. Huang’s shining moment is the way she portrays her utter mortification after a particular event that occurs in the Novak living room; it is palpable and gives the audience great sympathy for her character.
Vanessa Eskridge, playing ‘the home-team wife, Veronica Novak, delivers a meticulously crafted ‘Stepford Mother’ with this edgy aloofness wrapped in cultural affluence and smothered in pretention. There are moments when some of Eskridge’s delivery feels stifled and stilted, and while this occasionally works in convincing the audience that she’s just high-strung and trying to keep a masked lid on her internal drama, there are other moments where it reads more along the lines of ‘actor losing her place momentarily.’ Again this minor hiccups are easily forgiven, particularly when Eskridge comes bursting out of her character’s well-composed façade, particularly when she gets up Michael Novak’s face towards the end of the production.
It’s a knock-down, drag-out all-star fight for which actor takes up more emotional space with their larger-than-life personalities in this production. Matt Leyendecker, as ‘home team husband’ Michael Novak, and Troy Jennings, as ‘visiting team husband’ Alan Raleigh, are entertaining as they are versatile in their performances throughout the production. Jennings, who absorbs all the air when his character becomes decidedly excited or enthusiastic about something, gives a fascinating portrayal of a character we all recognize too-well. The Alan Raleigh character is a stereotypical high-powered business man (in this play, a lawyer) who is surgically attached at the mouth to his cell-phone, can flip on a dime to be screaming business terms into said cell-phone, and then suddenly nodding politely with the most forced of phony smiles. Jennings delivers a great deal of animated facial expressions, though at times because he’s so enthusiastically invested in this character, the lines between blatant sarcasm and sincere hilarity become quite blurred. As for Matt Leyendecker, his character delivers a great many of the audience’s hard, ‘laugh-out-loud’ lines, particularly because he is the character who falls down the slippery slope of colorful adult language first. When he blasts out one of the funniest lines- a comic reveal about who he really is as a character- it’s bombastic and brilliant. Both Jennings and Leyendecker possess an indescribable charm— like an anti-charisma that just wafts out into the audience and makes you cringe and giggle simultaneously.
There’s a great deal of conflict unraveling, a great many intriguing moments peppered throughout the production, and at its core, the show is a great insight into what we believe ourselves as civilized human beings to be verses what our reality is when it comes to attempting to being civilized with one another. If you’re looking for an evening of theatre that is equal parts perplexing and evocative, entertaining and enigmatic, and perhaps just downright strange and silly— God of Carnage at Vagabond Players is the ticket for you this season.
Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission
God of Carnage plays through March 13, 2022 at Vagabond Players— located in the heart of Fells Point: 806 S. Broadway in Baltimore, MD. For more information on tickets, seating and Covid policies, please call the box office at (410) 563-9135. Tickets are available for purchase in advance online.
