Sunday, April 19, 2009 - Posts
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If you're ambivalent about having kids, you might want to rush out to see The Gods of Carnage, the latest play by French playwright Yasmina Reza. On Broadway for another week or so, in a star-studded staging, it's a witty, poignant critique of the contemporary bourgeois obsession with parenting. The play revolves around a simple dramatic situation: An 11-year-old boy hits another boy in his class with a stick, accidentally breaks two of his teeth, and partially exposes a nerve in his gums. In the old days, this was called "Boys will be boys." In the age of the Mommy Wars, it's an occasion for the parents to sit down to spell out exactly what happened in a formal legal document. At the opening of the play, the parents are arguing over whether the letter should note that one son was "armed" with a stick or merely "furnished" with it. But what begins as a highly scripted get-together with everyone straining to play the role of the engaged, together, thoughtful parent quickly devolves into total anarchy and chaos. By the end of the play, the nicely arranged tulips in vases have been strewn all over the floor, and everyone's drunk.
Reza is interested in how our preoccupation with parenting conventions is in fact a way of avoiding a messier truth: that few people have figured out how to have an egalitarian marriage; that trying to have one is itself exhausting; and that careful legislation of sex and power has only led to the repression of a lot of anger and transgressive eros. At one point, the character played by James Gandolfini—whose son was the "victim"—loses his temper and launches into a tirade that quickly devolves to a plaint: "Children come in to our lives, and then they destroy them," he says. I found the play at once hilarious and heartbreaking (to trot out two hoary adjectives), mainly because Reza is sympathetic to her characters even though they act, at many points, despicably. Even while cringing at their behavior, I recognized it—especially the way that the alliances shift quickly over the course of coffee. At moments each couple is pitted against the other; at others, the women against the men, and vice versa. Intelligently, Reza stages the whole thing without ever showing you the children themselves.
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