This is a very funny and weird and good play completely ruined by Roman Polanski’s adapting it. The casting was even great…Jodie Foster, John C Reilly, Kate Winslet, and Christoph Waltz….that’s five Oscars right there, plus Roman Polanski adding another.
So anyway! I was mad because I otherwise would have watched it, but knowing that I would have been too distracted by the associations I couldn’t.
So I read it. In the play, two sets of parents living in New York are meeting after a playground incident where one boy has injured another by hitting him in the mouth with a stick, knocking two teeth out. Now trying to be civil the parents are trying to figure out the best way to resolve the conflict. Within the open moments they are already arguing about the language used to describe the incident. Then, there’s the constantly interrupting phone calls, as one husband keeps taking calls about his pharmaceutical company’s recent connection to alarming side-effects of a drugs. The phone calls, the language, the fight, the flower arrangement and dessert used to soften the conversation, the rum, and some vomiting all start to degrade and dissolve all the built up goodwill and the true natures of the people and especially the social masks begin to expose the actual feelings. The primary feeling of the whole situation, especially bringing the phonecalls into, is self-preservation.
The play reminds me a lot of a more illiberal version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14211.Yasmina_Reza)