'God of Carnage' a masterpiece of psychological nuance

NORFOLK

Chris Hanna, artistic director of the Virginia Stage Company, saw “God of Carnage” on Broadway at its celebrity-packed pinnacle.

James Gandolfini, better known as the actor who played Tony Soprano, was one of the four famous performers. The others were Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis.

“God of Carnage” collected gobs of media raves and won the Tony Award for best play. French playwright Yasmina Reza wrote “Carnage,” and it was translated by Christopher Hampton.

The show takes place over 90 minutes in a Brooklyn living room. Two upper-crust couples meet to discuss a problem between their sons. One boy wielded a stick; the other lost two front teeth.

As the evening begins, all four express a desire for a civilized resolution. As the play progresses, the social veneer peels off and the “god of carnage” threatens to overtake them.

Individuals take sides, but alliances keep shifting – women against men, couple against couple, wife against husband.

“I sat there and said, ‘Every performance is amazing.’ ”

And yet, he and his wife were underwhelmed.

“As wonderful as the performances were, the play didn’t add up to a story I believed.”

Hanna’s view reversed direction – as the play constantly does – and now he’s directing it as Virginia Stage’s season opener.

He reconsidered the play in late spring after he lost his previously planned opening show, the new musical comedy “Aesop and Company,” due to the death of its producer. At that point, he scanned the possibilities and saw that “Carnage” had just been released for production at regional professional theaters such as Virginia Stage.

So he read the script. Then he marched into managing director Keith Stava’s office with his own rave: “This is a fabulous play!”

“Everybody thought that production on Broadway was so definitive. It never occurred to me that the play could be better than it was.”

“It’s actually stronger” without the celebrity cast, he asserted. While star power sells tickets, all of those sparkling presences can distract from the story being told onstage.

Hanna saw a lot in the script that excited him. And since Virginia Stage will be among the first in the nation, outside of New York and Los Angeles, to produce it, numerous great actors approached him, he said.

“I got the cream of the crop in terms of nonstar actors.” When a hot new show gets released for regional productions, top actors line up, he explained. “But once the best actors have played these roles, they’ll move on to other roles. As an artistic director, you start casting from the B pool.”

In Norfolk, all four cast members have stellar theater credits, as well as television and film work. Henny Russell, who has performed on Broadway, will play opposite her husband, Ward Duffy, who has off-Broadway and top regional theater credits.

Russell and Duffy are a married couple playing a married couple that airs its grievances through the evening. They’ll play the Gandolfini-Harden couple, Michael the wholesaler and Veronica the writer.

Hanna said he had never before cast a couple as a couple. He said he told them early on, “OK, you’re going to have to go places in the play that I hope you never have to go as a real couple.”

Sue Cremin, who plays Annette, a “wealth manager,” has performed off-Broadway and at the nation’s top regional theaters. Laurence Lau, who was in the national tour of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “August: Osage County,” has the role of Annette’s husband, Alan, a high-powered lawyer.

“What I love is that when you sit down at the beginning of the evening, you have no clue where it’s going,” Hanna said. “Even as you’re watching, suddenly it will take a turn. How did we get here?”

Hanna said the play is like a school of fish that keeps switching directions. One of his tasks as a director is to determine which will be the first fish to turn. “It’s got to be so exact. Suddenly things will shift in the room, and it’s always over the smallest thing.”

The play is a masterpiece of psychological nuance, he said. On Broadway, however, the subtlety of the characters’ interactions got lost.

Hanna has thought carefully about every moment, just where characters will place themselves, using what body language that was intended to communicate a certain something to the others.

“Which chair are they sitting in? If they’re sitting on the arm of the chair, that signals a shift in allegiance,” he gave as an example.

“We’re just about to do our first run-through,” he said last week, referring to a rehearsal where actors perform the entire show without stopping. “We’ve worked on all these micro-moments. Now it’s time to add water.

“This is when I find out whether the work I’m doing has been in the right direction.”

He’s seeking “moment-to-moment truthfulness.”

The tone he’s after is “right down the middle between comedy and drama. My hope is that it is fully both, that it goes back and forth very quickly. If you have both at the same time, you get mashed potatoes.

“Versus, if you slice it really thin going back and forth between comedy and drama, then you get a really compelling evening. That’s my favorite evening in theater.”

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com