My second God Of Carnage rehearsal, which I attended on the evening of February 14th, was a much different experience than my first, not least because I finally got to see the actors working on stage.
The rehearsal begins with a fight call. I get to see a lot of the progress that has been made since the creative team first began choreographing these sequences. They go through each scene at three different speeds and work through some minor kinks in positioning and actions. It is interesting to see the difference in how they work on the stage as opposed to a studio room: they must now contend with the actual set pieces in their wrestling ring, which adds another obstacle to the fight choreography. Additionally, the actors not involved in the physical altercations are now reacting to and participating in the scene. So much more character work has gone into these scenes, with each actor interrogating and understanding their motivations and goals.
After the fight call and some Viewpoints warmups, they start running through scenes in the latter half of the play. Being able to see these scenes in their entirety rather then just in the snippets that surround movement-heavy sections is, of course, very helpful to my understanding of the play. Context is key. A lot of the blocking is different from when I last saw it, and significant progress has been made with line memorization. Director Heather Davies encourages the actors to try alternate blocking, explore different tactics, and ensure their actions and motivations are aligned.
In seeing the play in a slightly more complete state, I am able to better grasp the meanings and messages it generates in production. During the first rehearsal I attended, when I encountered the characters’ bigotry and toxic behaviour, I felt a little disappointed because I assumed it was easy shorthand to show that they’re bad people. For audience members it can be distressing to hear homophobic and racist language onstage, even in a context that condemns the behaviour. From what I witness from the actors in this rehearsal, I now believe that it serves a more complex purpose in developing the characters. Namely, it exposes their incredible lack of sympathy and emotional connections with one another. There’s a moment where Michael goes on a bigoted tirade about his wife Veronica’s obsession with Africa, and she asks him why he’s choosing to show himself in such a horrible light. His response is, “Because I feel like it!” This is one of the moments that most successfully highlights the ironic childishness that the adults are displaying. The reason they’re being cruel and saying terrible things is because they’ve stopped acting like adults and started acting like children, lashing out at anything that upsets them and losing the inhibitions and propriety expected of them. The parents are supposed to be meeting on behalf of their children, but as the play continues, they derail completely from their original course of action into bullying each other and pointlessly arguing. Not only are they failing their children, they are failing their themselves and society. Children often call each other names without really thinking about what it means. There’s significant conversation between the couples about whether Annette and Alan’s son Benjamin understood what he did when he broke Veronica and Michael’s son’s teeth, and I pick up on elements of that lack of understanding in the adult’s behaviour as well. For various individual reasons, they don’t seem to acknowledge the others as real people with feelings. Veronica’s ego means she sees herself as better then them, Annette is only concerned with appearances, Alan is work-obsessed and dismissive of anything that’s not his job, and Michael is nihilistic and myopic about the world around him.
The tone of the play also becomes clearer to me in this rehearsal. There are comedic moments throughout, as both couples wreak havoc on each other and themselves, but ultimately, the play is about sad, miserable people whose marriages are falling apart and who are ruining their own lives – this is portrayed in a fairly serious way. But God Of Carnage could just as easily be a dark comedy as a drama. Any play in production will experiment with tone and delivery, and getting the intended atmosphere can be a difficult and long process. I speak with Davies about this after the rehearsal, and she indicates that she is shooting for a mostly serious tone by the end of the rehearsal process. Though some moments are intentionally funny, the focus should be on the drama and the consequences of these characters’ quickly deteriorating emotional states. Of course, in the rehearsal space, it can take a lot of time and work to get the correct tone successfully conveyed by the actors. There are about two more weeks of rehearsals left, and I’m excited to see how successful the production will be in nailing its intended tone.