Category Archives: Ryan Rilette

God of Carnage or Why the end of the world is A-OK

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Oh, the carnage. The cast of Marin Theatre Company’s God of Carnage comprises, from left, Remi Sandri, Stacy Ross, Rachel Harker and Warren David Keith. Below: Ross works out some of her frustration on Sandri as Keith watches. Photos by Ed Smith


Watching four people try to practice “the art of coexistence,” as the playwright puts it, is entertaining but ultimately depressing in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage at Marin Theatre Company. One of the hottest plays in recent memory, Carnage is the perfect storm of contemporary drama. It has one set, four actors and that perfect blend of satirically repulsive comedy and apparent moral heft. Oh, and it has impressive vomit special effects and that most satisfying of dramatic dénouements, the destruction of a mobile phone.

What it doesn’t have – not even in this brilliantly produced MTC version – is a satisfying reason for being. It puts on a good show with a few laughs (some guilty, some not) and the can’t-turn-away watchability of a horrible traffic accident where you have that fleeting feeling that it could have been you in that gnarled, bloody mass of steel and glass. But it doesn’t turn those elements into anything larger or more profound or even profoundly funny.

If you’ve seen the Roman Polanski movie version of the play (called simply Carnage), you haven’t really seen it. The movie, starring Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster, is dreadful from start to finish. Watching it, you feel like the play should have never left the stage, where the audience plays a huge role with outsize reactions and a heightened sense of absurdity. We’re all in it together in a theater exercising our willing suspension of disbelief (a real asset to Reza’s play), but the movie plays it like reality, and that absolutely makes mincemeat of Carnage.

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The great pleasure of MTC’s Carnage is the quartet of actors under the direction of Ryan Rilette. It’s all about game playing and false fronts and shifting loyalties as two couples gather in a Brooklyn apartment to discuss an act of 11-year-old on 11-year-old violence. One couple’s son bashed the other’s son in the face with a stick, so the parents are making like grown-ups and discussing it with broad-minded civility.

The good intentions and strained smiles last for a few minutes at best, then the claws start to emerge and the ugliness descends. What spins out for 80 minutes is humiliation, rum, optimism, pessimism, brutality, savagery, pettiness and a pear-apple clafouti that will forever give that dessert a bad name.

Stacy Ross and Remi Sandri are Veronica and Michael Novak, the kind of hip, successful parents you imagine living in a Brooklyn apartment decorated with lots of cool African masks on the walls (the set by Nina Ball is exaggerated perfection). He deals in domestic hardware and she writes books about the massacre in Darfur. Warren David Keith and Rachel Harker are Alan and Annette Raleigh, seemingly another category of parents. He’s a high-powered lawyer (he’s trying a case in The Hague and says things to coworkers like “We’ll think about the victims later, Murray.”) and she’s in wealth management. He’s always on his phone tending to business and she…well, she is hard to peg until the rum starts melting her mask.

This play (translated by Christopher Hampton) is a nasty piece of work, with lots of talk about “fucking Neanderthals” and the total destruction (emotionally, anyway) of the one character who claims to care about culture and society and civilization and all it stands form. But the most depressing thing about these four people is their almost total lack of humor. “I don’t have a sense of humor and have no intention of acquiring one,” says Veronica. Now that hurts. The one thing that might engender connection among these people (even among the spouses themselves) is a good laugh, perhaps not at another person’s expense or fueled by hatred or rage or utter disgust.

Reza is satisfied to turn her cosmopolitan quartet into a snarling clutch of wild animals, weeping and bemoaning the world and one another. And it’s not enough. It’s not a fully satisfying evening of theater. The play doesn’t have the courage to head into complete despair, nor does it have the boldness to offer some sort of alternative (except maybe a hint of loving and caring for your children above all other petty distractions). The best we can hope for, according to Alan, is “one pain the balls after another.” Ouch.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage continues through June 17 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $34-$50. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org.

Shadows fall on suburbia in Yockey’s beguiling Bellwether

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A strange disappearance: Parents of a missing child (Gabriel Marin and Arwen Anderson on couch) meet with police detectives (Danny Wolohan and Patrick Jones, far left and far right) under the watchful eye of a nosy neighbor (Rachel Harker) in Steve Yockey’s Bellwether at Marin Theatre Company. Below: Anderson meets Kathryn Zdan in the suburban underworld. Photos by www.DavidAllenStudio.com

Audacious, entertaining and chilling, Steve Yockey’s world-premiere Bellwether at Marin Theatre Company goes where few plays dare to tread.

What starts out as a satiric look at suburban living – Bellwether is a nice neighborhood, we’re told over and over again, a gated community commuter distance from an unnamed big city – quickly becomes a potent family drama. A husband and wife (Gabriel Marin and Arwen Anderson) have hit some rocky ground as they and their about-to-turn-7-year-old daughter try adjusting to suburban living.

The show becomes a crime thriller when little Amy disappears from her bed while her mom was downstairs with a neighbor and a bottle of wine. And then it turns into something Stephen King might dream up in a novel or short story. Yockey delves into the underworld of suburbia, a dark, dangerous place that balances the shiny, happy existence up top.

That Yockey – MTC’s playwright in residence for the 2009-10 season – anchors the fantastical aspects of the story with his exploration of family life in the suburbs does him credit. He and director Ryan Rilette manage something very tricky here with a tone that shifts from satirical comedy to high drama to horror.

Much of the success of these tonal shifts come from the utterly believable performances at the center of the story. Marin’s intensity and near hysteria powerfully convey the desperation of a father whose child has slipped away from him, and Anderson, though not as intense, displays guilt and determination in equal measure.

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Rachel Harker as a needy, nosy neighbor is extraordinary. She’s like a sitcom character at first but goes through several iterations, all of which she fills with depth and frightening accuracy.

At less than two hours, Bellwether grabs your attention immediately and only tightens its grip as it zips along. I would say that Yockey spends too much time in the underworld – where there is fine work by Jessica Lynn Carroll and Kathryn Zdan. We get a sketchy explanation about how this world works, but it could be swifter and more enigmatic. We don’t want too much time to linger and think about this situation because implausibilities start popping up alongside questions that don’t get answered.

Back on the strangely quiet streets of Bellwether, Yockey and Rilette whip up an increasingly wild mob of neighbors (including Danny Wolohan, Liz Sklar, Marissa Keltie, Mollie Stickney and Patrick Jones) and a trio of inane (naturally) and vampiric TV news reporters.

Bellwether packs quite a punch, from the striking performances to the sumptuous two-level suburban home set by Giulio Cesare Perrone and sinister lighting by York Kennedy.

When the play ends, and it’s hard to know what to think exactly because your head is spinning. Was it funny? Scary? Moving? Yes. Bellwether is, in short, fantastic. In every sense of the word.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Steve Yockey’s Bellwether continues through Oct. 30 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $34-$55 ($15 rush tickets available one hour prior to show, based on availability; under 30: $20, all performances). Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org.

Something Fuddy going on here

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Andrew Hurteau and Mollie Stickney great the day with resolve and a blank slate in the Marin Theatre Company production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers. Below: Stickney with the puppet Hinky Binky. Photos by Kevin Berne

The world of David Lindsay-Abaire is askew. From his earliest wacky comedies to his later, more serious award-winning work, Lindsay-Abaire’s “askewniverse” (to borrow a word from Kevin Smith’s oeuvre) is filled with people on the outside of perceived normal life, people who are, for whatever reason, struggling just to make themselves understood.

In Shrek the Musical it’s a green ogre who takes a while to figure out that even though he’s not a handsome prince, he’s actually a hero. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole it’s a mother numbed by grief slowly rebuilding a life and marriage after the death of her young son.

And in Fuddy Meers, Lindsay-Abaire’s first produced play (written while he was still in grad school at Juilliard), it’s an exceedingly cheerful woman named Claire who suffers from psychogenic amnesia.

It’s like Drew Barrymore in the movie 50 First Dates (produced five years after Fuddy Meers by the way): every morning she wakes up a blank slate. She has no memory of her life or the people in it. The thought of that affliction sounds somewhat terrifying, but both Drew in the movie and Claire, the hero of the play, seem quite content to orient themselves to their lives and get on with their days.

In both cases, they have helpful people around to speed the process. In Claire’s case, she has her husband, Richard, who has created a binder of helpful hints to fill in the giant blank of Claire’s life.

In addition to Richard, Claire also has a 17-year-old son, Kenny, who seems to be having some difficulty graduating the eighth grade. With every day the first day of your life, the possibilities of a fresh start are practically endless, though you have a lot of fresh-starting to do before bedtime comes and wipes the slate clean again.

Marin Theatre Company’s production of Fuddy Meers has the great advantage of having Mollie Stickney in the role of Claire. In the play’s nearly two hours, Claire’s blank slate becomes surprisingly full, and every revelation, recovered memory, moment of joy or pain registers on Stickney’s wonderfully expressive face.

As luck (and the playwright) would have it, we meet Claire on a particularly dramatic day in her usually placid life. Very soon after waking and discovering that she has no memories, Claire meets two men: her husband (played with loving, somewhat frustrated gusto by Andrew Hurteau) and a masked stranger claiming to be someone from her past.

This limping, lisping guy is played by Tim True, whose performance is at once scary and hilarious – no mean feat.

Once this guy limps in, the rest, as they say in comedy, is mayhem.

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To reveal any more about the plot would be a crime, and I’d have to administer an amnesiac drug. There are surprises galore here – some delightful, some rather contrived.

But I will say that there are some sparkling performances in director Ryan Rilette’s production. Joan Mankin as Gertie, Claire’s mom, is at once touching and hysterically funny. Gertie is recovering from a stroke and suffers from word-twisting aphasia. She can almost make herself understood – more in tone than in word.

It’s from Gertie that the play gets its title. That’s her way of saying “funny mirrors” like in a carnival funhouse, which is what this play resembles in its twisted, contorting version of family life.

Lance Gardner is Millet, a colleague of the limping man’s who has a penchant for a hand puppet named Hinky Binky. Gardner’s somewhat schizophrenic performance is equal parts funny, disturbing and sympathetic.

Not all of the rhythms in Rilette’s production work – some of the transitions in Eric Flatmo’s set from kitchen to basement, take too long and slow the comic flow. Act 1 ends with a bang (literally) but without as much rapport between characters and audience as you might hope to find.

But it’s not all about comedy here, and that’s why Act 2 is so much more rewarding. There’s a pall of sadness hovering just over the chaos, and a lot of that has to do with the son, Kenny (a touching, angry Sam Leichter, losing his mom every day.

The final scene of Fuddy Meers brings the emotion to the forefront. Things may be twisted and tiled in David Lindsay-Abaire’s world, but when it comes right down to it, even people approaching life from different angles still just want to connect.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers continues through April 24 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $33-$53. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org for information.