This September, the Academy Players of Fairfield University bring to the stage Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning dark comedy, God of Carnage.
Performances will run Sept. 10-13, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. and Sept. 14, 2025, at 2 p.m. in the Wien Experimental Theatre at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University.
The play is performed and produced by a group of University faculty as part of an integrated academic experience, but performances are open to the public. The cast includes Nels Pearson, PhD, professor of English, as Alan Raleigh; Jerelyn Johnson, PhD, professor of modern languages and literatures, as Annette Raleigh; Dennis Keenan, PhD, professor of philosophy, as Michael Novak; and Sonya Huber, PhD, professor of English, as Veronica Novak. Alistair Highet, executive director of the Center for Arts & Minds, serves as the production’s director.
In late 2005, Tony Award-winning playwright Yasmina Reza was between projects when something happened to her son: his friend had his tooth broken in a fight with a playmate. To her amazement, she learned that the parents of the two children didn’t speak about it. “Can you imagine?,” the mother of the injured child told her. “The parents didn’t even call me.”
The incident inspired God of Carnage, which won the Olivier Award for Best Play in London in 2009, as well as three Tony Awards, including Best Play in New York in 2009 for a production that starred James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, and Marcia Gay Harden (who won the Tony that year for Best Actress). In the American version, translated here by Christopher Hampton, the action moves to the Cobble Hill Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Before the play begins, two 11-year-old boys, Benjamin and Henry, get involved in a fight, leading to a loss of teeth. That evening the parents of both children meet to discuss the matter. What begins as a lofty exercise in the “art of co-existence” quickly degenerates into a slurry of ungovernable instinct and desperate self-preservation. Ben Brantley, writing of the pleasures of the Broadway production in the New York Times noted the “cathartic release of watching other people’s marriages go boom.”
This production of God of Carnage is a continuation and expansion of Fairfield University’s integrated academic engagement initiative started 14 years ago with the production Perpetual Peace (2011), then expanded with Glengarry Glen Ross (2012), Way to Heaven (2013), Life of Riley (2014), All in the Timing: Five Short Comedies by David Ives (2016), and Life Sucks (2017). The actors, producers, and directors are all Fairfield University faculty and staff. The 2012 production of Glengarry Glen Ross was favorably profiled in the New York Times.
The Fairfield University faculty and staff involved with this project realize the importance of using the humanities—and particularly the theatre—as a teaching laboratory in which to explore the complex issues of the day. It has been an opportunity to create a genuinely collaborative cultural work on campus. Faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, and community members have all come together to make these productions possible. For God of Carnage, the Academy Players of Fairfield University will bring in several professors to engage with audience members post-performance, looking at the play—and the thoughts and ideas it brings up—through the lenses of religion, philosophy, and comparative literature.
God of Carnage was produced on Broadway by Robert Fox, David Pugh & Dafydd Rogers, Stuart Thompson, Scott Rudin, Jon B. Platt, The Weinstein Company, and The Shubert Organization.
