Next on our stage: MAKING GOD LAUGH MOTHERS AND SONS EURYDICE NOV. 15-DEC. 23 JAN. 17-FEB. 17 MARCH 14-APRIL 14 HIGHLIGHTS A companion guide to “God of Carnage” by Yasmina Reza translated by Christopher Hampton Sept. 13-Oct. 14, directed by Virginia Drake 2018 Synopsis In a stylish Brooklyn apartment, two sets of parents meet for a talk about a playground fight between their children. The tulips are flawlessly arranged and the art books perfectly stacked, but it doesn’t take long for the gloves to come off. As espresso gives way to rum and diplomacy to brutal honesty, the couples find that deep down, we’re all controlled by our gut reactions. Characters The play’s four characters are all in their 40s and all comfortably upper-middle-class. While the play was originally written in French and set in France, Christopher Hampton’s translation moves the action to New York. Annette (April Green): She works in wealth management, is prone to visceral anxiety, and seems quite attached to her purse. Alan (Erik Gandolfi): As soon as he gets off his phone, he’ll tell you about being a lawyer representing a pharmaceutical company, and why you should not at all worry about that persistent dizziness. Veronica (Karyn Rondeau): Don’t call her Ronnie. Though she repeatedly urges civility, Veronica can also be fiery. She’s a Above: There’s always that guy who won’t get off the phone. From writer specializing in African issues. left, Michael (Avondina Wills), Veronica (Karyn Rondeau) and Annette (April Green); Alan (Erik Gandolfi) in front. Previous page: From left, Michael (Avondina Wills): Quite pleasant at first. Would you Wills, Rondeau, Green and Gandolfi. Show photos by Taylor Sanders. like to hear about the toilet fittings he sells through his wholesale company? “Hey, I know that guy…” Half the fun of being a City Lights regular is recognizing actors from past shows. Avondina Wills is new to us, but you may recognize Erik Gandolfi, April Green and Karyn Rondeau from their past strolls across our boards. Erik graced our stage twice last season, most recently as affable father Ron in The Siegel. Before that, he played quite a different role as the segregationist Senator Higgins in Alabama Story. The previous season, he was the bed-hopping Don in Rapture, Blister, Burn. April made indelible impressions as Gallimard’s long-suffering wife Helga Erik Gandolfi in “Alabama Story.” in M. Butterfly and diva Emma in Stupid F**king Bird, and we were delighted to have her back as Saleria in The Merchant of Venice last season. A few years back, Karyn played Mama Maddelena in our production of Nine. She’s also a cabaret singer, who sang on our stage this summer in the bold Curvy Cabaret, part of our Lights & Music Concert Series. About the show and playwright When playwright Yasmina Reza’s son was a young teen, a friend of his had his tooth broken in a playground fight. Soon after, Reza ran into the friend’s mother in the street and asked how the boy was doing. The mother was upset. Not because of the tooth, but the parents of the fight-instigator had never even called to see how her son was doing. “Can you imagine?” she asked. Reza could. In fact, she could picture the situation so well that she then wrote a play about it in three months. That’s the story behind God of Carnage, as Reza once told it to The Guardian. Sometimes inspiration strikes—and hits hard. Yasmina Reza. Photo: power axle. Originally called Le Dieu de Carnage in Reza’s native French, the play is one of many successful creations in her writing career. Born in 1959 to an Iranian pianist father and a Hungarian violinist mother, she trained as an actor but swiftly became an award-winning playwright. Her 1987 play Conversations after a Burial won the Molière Award (the French equivalent of the Tony) for Best Author, setting off a Molière streak. Winter Crossing won the Molière for Best Fringe Production in 1990, and Art won for Best Author in 1995. Reza’s translation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was nominated for the award for Best Translation. Off the stage, Reza also made a splash with her 2007 book L’Aube le Soir ou la Nuit (Dawn Dusk or Night). She wrote it after following Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign for a year leading up to his election as president of France. The candid portrait was hardly a fluff piece. God of Carnage, which also debuted on the world stage in 2007, doesn’t pull any punches, either. It’s been hailed as brilliant satire of upper-middle-class society and modern parenting (more on that later in this issue of Highlights), and many talented actors have lined up to sink their teeth into the script. First performed in Zürich (in German), the play traveled to London in 2008, with Christopher Hampton’s translation and featuring Ralph Fiennes. Then, the 2009 Broadway run starred Hope Davis, Jeff Daniels, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden. Numerous awards followed, including the Tony for Best Play and the Laurence Olivier Award (in Britain) for Best New Comedy. In 2014, City Lights presented Yasmina Reza’s play “Art,” about the turmoil that erupts among three friends when one spends a small fortune on an all-white Reza is not generally keen on having her plays painting. From left, Jeffrey Bracco, Kit Wilder and Max Tachis. Photo by Mike Ko. adapted for the screen, but she agreed to have the movie Carnage made, in part due to her admiration of Roman Polanski, who directed. This faithful adaptation of the play starred Jodi Foster, John C. Reilly, Christopher Waltz and Kate Winslet. Along with God of Carnage, Reza’s works are praised as flawlessly skewering hypocrisy and the gloss obscuring the messier parts of society. That may be true, but the playwright herself says she’s more interested in the individual characters rather than any societal statements the stories make. “What motivates me most is writing about people who are well brought up and yet, underneath that veneer, they break down,” she told The Guardian. “Their nerves break down. It’s when you hold yourself well until you just can’t any more, until your instinct takes over. It’s physiological.” God of Carnage and helicopter parenting Gone are the days when a simple handshake could end a playground fight. "Go on, Tommy," a father used to urge. "Shake his hand and make up." And then it was back to the baseball diamond. That’s not the case in the God of Carnage world. Here, two sets of parents practically try to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles to end their sons’ battle, in which one boy has knocked out two of the other boy’s teeth with a stick. Should there be an apology? When and where? Was he “armed” with a stick, or is the proper word “furnished”? It’s all a perfect example of the modern phenomenon of “helicopter parenting,” in which moms and dads hover constantly, involved in every aspect of a child’s life. Playwright Yasmina Reza is a whiz at poking holes in manners and mores; these parents make fine targets. According to Parents magazine, “helicopter parent” was first seen in a ‘60s book about parents and teens, but it didn’t hit the mainstream until more recently; the term debuted in the dictionary in 2011. Mothers and fathers can hover due to anxiety, peer pressure from other parents who are already helicoptering, or overcompensation for feelings of neglect from their own childhood. “The main problem with helicoptering parents is that it backfires,” psychologist-author Anne Dunnewold said in Parents. “The underlying message the overinvolvement sends to kids is ‘my parent doesn’t trust me to do this on my own,’ (leading) to a lack of confidence.” In God of Carnage, we don’t see how the sons react. But we do see plenty of examples of the parents analyzing and overanalyzing their boys’ behavior and personalities. It seems impossible for these characters to separate themselves from The negotiations are going well. their analysis. When Michael, one of the fathers, learns that his son has a gang, he immediately exclaims, “That’s terrific!” Before long, the dads are traipsing down memory lane about their own childhood gangs, and fondly recalling “beating the shit out of” other kids. The mothers are appalled, and the emotion in the room amps up. Later in the play, the parents go back to arguing about the exact wording in their peace treaty: ANNETTE: We’re making a mistake not to take into account the origin of the problem. VERONICA: There’s no origin. There’s just an eleven-year-old child hitting someone. With a stick. ALAN: Armed with a stick. MICHAEL: We withdrew that word. ALAN: You withdrew it because we objected to it. MICHAEL: We withdrew it without any protest. ALAN: A word deliberately designed to rule out error or clumsiness, to rule out childhood. VERONICA: I’m not sure I’m able to take much more of this tone of voice. Not exactly a simple handshake. There’s a very modern micromanage-y feel to this 2009 play, written in an era of frivolous litigation and bazillion-page Terms of Use. As one reviewer put it: “This play could never have been written in the ‘50s, when parents allowed kids to sort out their own issues. Helicopter parents will have none of that nonsense.