"They're both dreadful," one character in "God of Carnage" says about two others. It doesn't matter who utters that line because any of the four could be saying it about any of the others. They all suck.

Yasmina Reza's rum-with-a-splash-of-acid comedy (translated from French by Christopher Hampton) tracks, in real time, the meeting of two couples whose kids have clashed on a playground. Theoretically, they're meeting to hash out an apology and a way forward. Actually, as they escalate from passive aggression to aggressive aggression, they're demonstrating who taught their kids to be thugs.

Reza, who also wrote "Art," is skilled at creating venom that hides beneath a veneer of civility. Smug Veronica (Mo Perry), who hosts the gathering with husband Michael (Luverne Seifert), opens the evening with talk of "the art of co-existence," but director Benjamin McGovern's clever arrangement of the characters within the Gremlin's thrust stage shows us that those two and guests Annette (Sara Marsh) and Alan (Peter Christian Hansen) begin jockeying for position immediately.

So you'll want to pay attention to details: Who's standing or sitting? Who seems dominant or submissive? Who's wearing shoes in this no-shoes house? Who ends up curled in a fetal position?

Most of those answers change as allegiances shift throughout the play's 80 minutes. Reza is adept at capturing the conversational slips that can cement or sever agreement between two people and at creating situations that help us see how insane it is for these four to think they're civil. That sort of thing peaks when we notice what none of the characters seem to: Even as the couples bicker about whether their children are "violent," Michael is in the middle of bragging about his childhood brawls.

"God of Carnage," which the Guthrie Theater produced in 2011, is smart about human foibles and this production is beautifully acted. The Gremlin stage is democratic — its layout and up-close-ness give us freedom to decide what to look at — and that pays off with these actors, who are all so dialed in that it's fun to watch the energy they shoot at each other with their eyes even when they're not directly involved in the conversational moment.

But as you might guess from that 80-minute running time, "Carnage" doesn't go very deep. We're encouraged to laugh at the foolishness of the four but, here and in "Art," Reza is unwilling to go further, to make us uncomfortable, to ask us to confront when we've been these same foolish people.

Again, the space helps. It's so intimate that it feels like we've been forced to attend this cocktail-party-of-the-damned, which kicks off with LCD Soundsystem's nightmarish "Call the Police." Even before the talk turns to assault rifles, even before a pet is murdered, even before 75 % of the characters describe this as the worst day of their lives, it's clear that Veronica knows what she's talking about when she moans, "This is going to end badly."

'God of Carnage'

Who: By Yasmina Reza (translated by Christopher Hampton). Directed by Benjamin McGovern. A Dark & Stormy Production.

When: 7:30 p.m., Wed.-Sat., 4 p.m. Sun. Ends Sept. 11.

Where: Gremlin Theatre, 550 Vandalia St., St. Paul.

Tickets: $25-$39, darkstormy.org.