Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Huan Bui, ‘God of Carnage’
In Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” winner of the 2009 Tony Award for Best Play, a playground altercation between 11-year-old boys brings together two sets of Brooklyn parents for a meeting to resolve the matter. At first, diplomatic niceties are observed, as Dramatists Play Service puts it, “but as the meeting progresses, and the rum flows, tensions emerge, and the gloves come off, leaving the couples with more than just their liberal principles in tatters.”
The comedy takes the University Theatre stage Nov. 11 for six performances under the direction of Huan Bui, an M.F.A. directing candidate. Originally from Vietnam, he had “five years of making theater before getting here to pursue my intense training on theater directing. To me, theater is such a beautiful and powerful language. Every live moment happening on stage is magical, yet fleeting, and it’s such a great exhilaration to witness those moments just for once.”
Here, Huan Bui answers three questions for What’s Up!
Q. Was “God of Carnage” your choice? If so, why?
A. It was one of my choices that I proposed for my thesis shows. My previous productions here were all dramatic and dark plays, so I really wanted to try myself with a comedy for my last show. “God of Carnage” just struck me how funny it is, but moreover I love different nuances of laughter that this show can bring to the audience. The playwright, Yasmina Reza, called her plays “funny tragedy,” which is also quite close to what we know about satire, a genre of comedy, where the “tragedy” value can also be involved in the laughter. For “God of Carnage,” there can be a bunch of things to contemplate after laughing, because we may realize that laughing at what happens in the story is also laughing at ourselves.
Q. How does this play challenge the actors working in it? What are they learning about themselves and about theater?
A. In this nearly 90-minute play, there is so much going on. The complexity in the language of the play really challenges me, from politics, religion, marriage, parenting skills, gender ideology, to the story of the hamster. It’s struggling to decode all those languages and make it woven with the characters’ values, but it also gives way to a lot of fun and comic moments to take place in this serious content.
Q. What do you hope audiences are talking about as they leave the play? Is there a message you hope to convey?
A. The time that I worked on script analysis for this play, the Russia-Ukraine war happened in the other part of the world. It struck me immediately how the reality of the world is so relevant to what’s written in the play.
The playwright wants to display a whole drama of human behavior in a contemporary context. She puts everything in this script between the thin line of civilization and savagery, and I hope the audience can also see themselves sometimes struggle to balance on this line. I wonder, is this also what is happening in the world right now? In the middle of the 21st century, among the civilized societies that we have been trying to maintain and develop, people are still ready to execute each other by tanks and bombs and guns. The situation between the two pairs of parents in this play is somehow nothing different from what is taking place out there with two organizations, two communities, or two countries. At the end, it occurs right inside of every individual, this game, this battle — the fight between civilization and savagery, the fight between ourselves with the “God of Carnage.”