items tagged with God of Carnage

THE IRON LADY

It’s hardly a newsflash that over the past several years – well, forever, really – Meryl Streep has treated us to a run of extraordinary performances, and her Margaret Thatcher in the screen biography The Iron Lady is one of the most extraordinary of them all. Yet the vexing question regarding Streep’s indelible work of late isn’t “How does she keep doing it?” It’s “How does she keep doing it with so little help from her directors?”

The Reader's chief theatre reviewer, Thom White, saw and wrote about 52 area stage productions in 2011. I saw 39 and reviewed 12. Obviously, during our second-annual breakfast chat on the Year in Theatre, there was a bit to talk about.

New Ground Theatre’s God of Carnage is one of the funniest shows, if not the funniest, I’ve seen on a Quad Cities stage so far this year. Not only is the script by playwright Yasmina Reza sharp, surprising, and witty, but director Derek Bertelsen’s handling of the pacing and his cast’s character choices had me laughing embarrassingly loudly at Thursday’s performance. Even two days later, I find myself mentally inserting quotable dialogue from the play into conversations (though I’d rather not quote any of it here, as most of the best lines involve the “F” word).