After the West Side Story review, on the New Yorker Web site, is Lahr's review of Reza's play:
A rumble of an altogether different kind takes place in the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s dark and hilarious farce “God of Carnage” (elegantly directed by Matthew Warchus, at the Bernard B. Jacobs), which in Christopher Hampton’s excellent translation has been relocated from Paris to the comfortable upper-middle-class environs of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In a handsomely minimal haute-bourgeois apartment (designed by Mark Thompson), a turf war takes place over a blood-red carpet, a coffee table chockablock with art books, and two elegant glass vases overflowing with white tulips. Instead of the Jets and the Sharks, the Novaks (Marcia Gay Harden and James Gandolfini) and the Raleighs (Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels) face off over the loutish playground behavior of their kids. Michael and Veronica Novak’s aggrieved eleven-year-old son Henry has had two teeth knocked out by Alan and Annette Raleigh’s son, Benjamin. “Madame, our son is a savage,” Alan, a cell-phone-addicted model of glib Gallic cynicism, explains. “To hope for any kind of spontaneous repentance would be fanciful.” Where the upper classes of the turn of the last century fought with property, these vindictive twenty-first-century Homo sapiens fight with principle. “I don’t see the point of existence without some kind of moral conception of the world,” Veronica, who is publishing a book on Darfur, says. She believes, she adds, “in the soothing powers of culture.” In ninety minutes of sustained mayhem, however, Reza wipes the masks of sang-froid off her whole monstrous regiment and demonstrates just how thin a line lies between civility and barbarity
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2009/03/30/090330crth_theatre_lahr