Carnage: A Comedy

I was pumped to go into The Actors Gang Theatre (9070 Venice Blvd - Culver City, CA) and see a really amazing evening of theatre with their current revival of “Carnage: A Comedy.” I felt like the show held promise and with a well respected name like Tim Robbins attached as one of the writers of this 20 year old satire, I knew I was in for the full treatment. I must say though it never quite congealed for me. When I was watching it, the acting was good and everything appeared to be as it should; upon further reflection, I have a few problems.

Perhaps it was the fact that, as Mr. Robbins, the artistic director, says in the liner notes “The play you will see tonight is the same play (which premiered in 1987). Except for one line referencing our current war in the first scene the play is unchanged.” Why would this be a problem? We’re still parsing our syllables over Shakespeare 400 years after the fact. To go back to the liner notes, “(When) we first performed “Carnage: A Comedy…we were a young and impassioned group and the play addressed issues that concerned us at the time. It was a vital and visceral experience…”

Okay. That’s fine. We’ve all had “vital” and “visceral” experiences which have helped to shape who we are today. But, haven’t you changed from those young minds at all? Yes, there are still hucksters telling us lies, trying to blow smoke back in the exhaust, turning water into wine and urine back into water; and yes, the sad but true fact is that statistically there is a sucker born every minute ready to buy what that shyster is selling, but really? Is that all there is?

We’re an educated group that goes to the theatre; what you’re telling us as an audience is that we don’t deserve any more nuance than one sentence from what you’d written twenty years ago when you were in your twenties yourselves! That’s not progress! I’d like to hope that everyone that was in that audience doesn’t still hold the same set of beliefs about people that they did twenty years ago. Yet, when Cotton Slocum gets into the cannon and the lights go black except for the little plastic action figure on a string lit up above the audience head by a spotlight to simulate “distance” I had a sudden realization that felt like Paul Reubens giving me his Big Top Pee Wee impressions of the way of the world. The Gospel According to Pee Wee. Let Us Pray.

More to the point of what your play was trying to say; Jerry Falwell is no longer with us; Pat Robertson is not nearly as relevant as he once was. We’re moving away from this type of thought into a more enlightened moment. With re-hashing of old stories and the airing of old grievances, we’re not moving the discussion forward in any kind of a productive manner.

Not to even get into the army segment of your show! I felt like I was in an Orwellian/Heller nightmare there for half of your play. But we can’t keep talking about the present as though the past were the only viable template. The Wild West, bible thumping, halleluiah that ya’ll were peddling is yesterday; let’s talk about right now. And tomorrow. That is our only course for safety and salvation on this earth.

I can’t go back to that place. I fell out with Pee Wee a long time ago. So, I think, did Reubens!