Tony winner opens here

Those are exactly the questions asked and answered in the Alliance Theatre’s latest production, “God of Carnage.” The comedy, by Yasmina Reza, won three of the top Tony awards in 2009 including best play. It has also been adapted by Roman Polanski into the 2011 film “Carnage” starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz.

The play opens Wednesday at the Alliance Theatre and runs through Jan. 29.

Originally written in French, the play was translated into English by Christopher Hampton. The protagonists are four upper-middle-class parents — erudite, successful, ostensibly sophisticated — trying to deal with the aftermath of an ugly fight between their respective sons.

But the more they talk, the more things become unhinged — to the point of falling apart. The Alliance’s production adds another layer by doing it with an all African-American cast, starring Jasmine Guy, Crystal Fox, Keith Randolph Smith and Geoffrey Darnell Williams.

“The play is asking, at what point do our impulses overtake our education and our sophistication,” said Kent Gash, the show’s director. “How does the evolved human being reckon with the parts that are primal and instinctive? And it’s a play that is as much about marriage as it is about parenting.”

Gash spent just over 7 1/2 years as associate artistic director of the Alliance before leaving three years ago to become the director of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts New Studio on Broadway. His former boss, Alliance artistic director Susan Booth, tapped him to direct “God of Carnage,” specifically requesting that he do it as an all-African-American production.

That choice doesn’t change the meaning of the play so much as it adds nuance, Gash said.

Originally, the Alliance wanted to set the play in Atlanta, rather than Brooklyn, N.Y., where the English translation sets it.

Setting it in Atlanta, with its large black middle class, would have added yet another level of depth.

But Reza would not allow the play’s location to be changed. Nonetheless, the fact that the characters in this production are African-American gives it a slightly different texture, particularly when the actors are referencing, say, the genocide in Darfur.

“Let’s not pretend,” said Gash. “Every African-American is not pro-Africa. It may not be popular to say, but there are African-Americans who hold the beliefs expressed by these characters.”

For Guy, who plays Veronica Novak, the mother whose son loses his teeth, the issue wasn’t so much the casting, but the translation of the material.

“The only time I stop and say, ‘Hmmm,’ is when it feels more British to me than American,” Guy said. “Some of the lines I have to stop and say to myself, ‘How do I make this sound like my character would say it?’ ”

And though it’s a comedy that essentially takes place in a well-appointed living room, it’s a room furnished primarily with sarcasm, anger and manipulation. At the end of rehearsals, Guy is drained.

“Within a beat you can turn on somebody,” she said. “As Kent said, it’s a very tightly written play. There are no mistakes in it.”

More than 10 years before “Death of a Salesman” played at the Yale Repertory Theatre with an all-black cast and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” played Broadway with an all African-American cast, a first for the Great White Way, Gash produced Tennessee Williams’ “Tin Roof” with an all African-American cast in Richmond in the late 1990s. Although the Broadway production broke ground in terms of casting, it also prompted discussion about the significance of “color blind” or “nontraditional” casting.

Through his experience with Richmond audiences, Gash already had reached some conclusions about the issue. The lesson he took away from his experience with the Tennessee Williams play was that the racial makeup of a cast was, for the most part, much less important than the quality of the performances given by the actors.

“What you do is the very best production you can possibly do and you try to honor everything the playwright intended,” Gash said.

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Theater preview

“God of Carnage”

A comedy by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Kent Gash. Stars Jasmine Guy, Crystal Fox, Keith Randolph Smith and Geoffrey Darnell Williams.

8 p.m. Wednesday; 7:30 p.m. Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 22; 7:30 p.m. Jan. 24-26; 8 p.m. Jan. 27; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Jan. 28; 2:30 and 7:30 Jan. 29. $30-$50. The Alliance Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, www.alliancetheatre.org.