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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Graceless under pressure

Modern CdA explores limits of human civility in ‘Carnage’

From left, Eric Paine, Daniel McKeever and Phoebe Oosterhuis star in Modern Theater’s production of “God of Carnage.”

Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage” traps us in an enclosed space with four self-absorbed, strong-willed characters and asks us to look on as they slowly unravel. By the end of the show, grievances have been aired, prejudices have been revealed, alliances have been formed and then broken, and they’re all but clawing at one another’s throats.

The Tony Award-winning play, which premieres tonight at the Modern Theater Coeur d’Alene, unfolds like a more manic, farcical version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”: It concerns two upper-middle class couples who, when confined to closed quarters for an evening, cling to forced civility until they crack and begin trampling on common sense and social graces. It’s like an episode of “Masterpiece Theater” devolving into a National Geographic special.

“It’s really intense for 80 to 90 minutes,” said the show’s director Heather McHenry-Kroetch, adding that maintaining the fleet pacing of Reza’s script was a challenge. “It was a very different process than doing a big musical, or even another comedy where people leave and come back. It’s just four people in one room. This is one long scene, really.”

That scene is sparked by an off-stage incident of childish violence: Two young boys have gotten into a fight on the school playground, and one of them has broken the other’s teeth by striking him with a large stick. The boys’ parents decide to meet and discuss what happened, to approach the issue with intelligence and empathy, and their sensibilities soon clash.

Alan (Daniel McKeever) and Annette (Emily Jones) are the parents of the stick wielder; Michael (Eric Paine) and Veronica (Phoebe Oosterhuis) are the parents of the victim. Each couple immediately takes the side of their own kid, but as the espresso they’re drinking gives way to booze, allegiances shift unexpectedly. This is a comedy of bad manners filtered through bourgeois scruples: When one of the characters vomits, the biggest faux pas is that it’s all over the expensive coffee table books.

“They behave as if they have very little compassion for the others,” McHenry-Kroetch said of Reza’s characters. “They have compassion for certain groups of people – at least they say they do – but their compassion for the person they’re talking to is missing.”

“God of Carnage” is one of those plays that naturally attracts great actors: The original Broadway cast included James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis, and Roman Polanski’s 2011 film adaptation starred Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly. That’s likely because the show is really an actor’s obstacle course, putting its characters through the physical and emotional wringer without the benefit of an intermission.

But McHenry-Kroetch says that, even though the comedy tends toward the broad, she made it a priority to keep the characters and their sparring worldviews from getting swallowed up in the vulgarity (this is, it should be noted, an R-rated play).

“You don’t go for the joke – you have real people in whatever situation they’re in – and there’s some funny stuff that comes out of that,” she said. “It definitely gets crazy busy. … When you’re acting how that character would behave in that situation, it works out. It is entertaining in its intensity, but I do think there’s a good human story for each of them.”