What I liked
N/A
What I didn't like
N/A
My overall impression
Start with two complex, confused human beings.
Add attraction, romance, hope. (That is, make them desperately in love with {addicted to?} each other.)
Now hand them an insoluble dilemma (or two), and fling the resulting goulash unceremoniously into a tiny airless room.
Bake on high for sixty minutes, and watch insanity expand like a defective sourdough.
Now, that’s my kind of dish.
But it’s time to switch metaphors, lest my reader become bored.
Who needs the tidy ballet of some arch-plot when you can dance the timeless, twisted tarantella of two half-found souls staggering their way through the maze of relationship itself?
The dialogue in “Dog of Carnage” is simultaneously hilarious, deep, and natural, a stunning achievement by Benjamin Schwartz; director Natalie Dressel’s staging is bold and clever; and the performances…
Oh, boy.
I can’t fit what I want to say about the performances into that sentence as structured. Starting over…
Occasionally I have the privilege of bearing witness to a moment in a play or a film that makes me proud to be an actor. Usually one or more tear is involved.
Despite the sickening glut of “content” to which one is subjected nowadays, that experience remains as rare as ever. In “Dog of Carnage,” it happened more than once.
So, to Callie Ott and Spencer Weitzel I say this: You were alive, you were honest, you were there. A few denizens of Earth know what that costs. To the rest: Enjoy the show.
