The ultimate voyeur play may well be "God of Carnage," the comedy written by Yasmina Reza about two couples who descend from civility to the horrors of barbarity right before our eyes.

The play opened at Off the Wall Theatre Thursday night under the direction of Jeremy C. Welter. It's a play that has great good humor that – both subtle and over the top, almost at the same time. It’s a play with four equally strong characters. Unfortunately in this production, there is a vast cavern between these characters.

The men, Welter and Max Williamson, bring savvy and comedic timing to their roles, but they are like two rowboats trying to head upstream without any oars. Because the two women in this production, Michelle White and Donna Lobacz, are beset by two of the worst enemies any actor can have: a faulty memory and a profound desire to overact.

White and Williamson are visited in their apartment by Lobacz and Weller to discuss a fight their young sons had at school. What starts as a civilized discussion soon becomes a descent into shifting alliances, one couple against the other, the men against the women, brief alliances between the two opposite spouses.

There is an element of slapstick to the whole thing, but like every comedy, timing is a critical element to both get the jokes and to move the story along.

The obvious flustering with lines by the women managed to put the brakes on any kind of rhythmic movement of the play. Far too many times, there were gargantuan pauses as one or the other woman struggled to remember what the line was. And far too many times, they stumbled over lines once they got started.

Perhaps the uncertainty over their lines also led to the sudden examples of over the top acting. It was almost as if the women had decided that the more they exaggerated their characters, the less we might recognize the weaknesses.

Actors have several obligations, but chief among them is to at least know their lines. Before you can make a playwright’s words come alive, you have to learn those words.

A big part of this unfortunate turn of events is that the women made it ever more difficult for the men to become fully realized characters. They are trapped in a story that isn’t so much luring us to follow as good comedy does, but dragging us along and hoping against hope that we keep up with what’s going on.

It was just about half a year ago that "God of Carnage" was mounted by the Umbrella Group, four accomplished and experienced Milwaukee actors. In that production, directed by Bo Johnson, we got the comedy, but we also recognized the bitterness and destructive nature of these characters.

In the production that opened Thursday, the whole thing was played at one level. It was hard to recognize where these characters were headed since we had almost no clue about where they had been.

Make no mistake about it, there are laughs in this production. Each of these characters has moments when the laugh is on the table, and the audience eagerly takes a bite.

But a key element in any play, comedy or drama, is that the audience has to believe that the characters are real people. They need to be real for us to care about who they are and what they do.

Unfortunately in this production, two of the characters, the women, were miles and miles away from being real people.

"God of Carnage" runs through March 1 and information on tickets and showtimes is available here.