Playwright Neil LaBute has been accused of being misogynistic—misanthropic, too—and now, with his latest slice-of-life play, "This Is How It Goes," which bowed Off-Broadway at the Public Theater on March 27, will racism be added to the litany of charges against him?
"There is plenty of room for labels," LaBute responds with a laugh during a phone interview. "And anytime some audiences see characters in a play behaving in a certain way—two men hurting a woman, for example—then the playwright gets labeled misogynistic. Of course, plays—and playwrights—can be labeled by audiences who have never even seen the play they're talking about." The affable 42-year-old Detroit native adds, "My plays are polarizing. People love them or loathe them."
"This Is How It Goes" will probably be no exception. The three-character piece, directed by George C. Wolfe, depicts the evolving relationship between an unhappily married interracial couple, Cody and Belinda (Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Peet), and an old friend, the Man (Ben Stiller), who resurfaces in their lives. The Man also serves as the play's narrator, guiding the audience through a labyrinth of events to a surprise ending.
An ambiguous figure who is more than a tad racist, the Man is nonetheless superficially likeable, whereas Cody, an African American, is cold, judgmental, and perhaps even violent, although that becomes increasingly less clear as the play moves on. The story is told from the Man's point of view.
LaBute maintains that although he is not concerned with writing politically correct works, the events in the play can be seen from Cody's vantage point as well as the Man's. And more to the point, the Man may not be recounting the events accurately, but simply voicing the rarely voiced but undoubtedly present racist views of the audience.
"I'm not comparing myself to playwrights of the Restoration, but they also used characters like the Man to address the audience and function as stand-ins for the audience," LaBute says. "The Man, a member of the society he is talking to, is also holding up a mirror to the society without being preachy. Like the Man, the audience may not be obviously racist, but when something is triggered…." LaBute does not complete the sentence. "And I don't think the Man is any more appealing than Cody."
He adds that Cody's unpleasantness can at least be accounted for. "Race was his Achilles' heel. He came from a rich and successful family, the only black family in the community, and [he's] very vulnerable because of it," LaBute suggests. "He was protected from racism, but at the same time very aware of it. He was treated with respect but knew what was out there. He saw himself as different and could easily be triggered." Not unlike the responses of the Man.
Creating these characters was no more daunting than forging any others who exist "outside my comfort zone," LaBute notes. "The challenge is to make them all real, not generic. The biggest challenge was dealing with the Man as narrator, leading the audience down one path and then changing course. The Man is a writer and he talks about Alfred Hitchcock's 'Strangers on a Train' and Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.' " Both works are characterized by unexpected twists and turns. "I was tweaking myself. There's playfulness here. I'm winking at the audience."
LaBute's previous play, "Fat Pig," which ran at the Lucille Lortel Theatre earlier this season, explores the impact—and brutality—of social pressure when an attractive 20-something man falls in love with a zaftig young woman. But LaBute is perhaps best known for his low-budget film "In the Company of Men," a work he directed and based on his own play, portraying two angry men who feel they've been stripped of their status. They believe that women have all the power and, as payback, they ferret out the most vulnerable woman they can find, seduce her, and dump her.
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Asked if he deliberately plays the provocateur, LaBute quips, "I plead the fifth," adding, "I don't shy away from subjects that come to me—and once I decide to do a subject, I don't pull back—but I'm not consciously stirring the pot or ripping stories out of headlines to create tension and thus shine the light on me. I'm not looking for each new play to top the last. This is hard, lonely work. I don't sit in Starbucks all day writing."
His earlier work includes the play and later film "The Shape of Things" (a piece that examines manipulation and betrayal) and "Nurse Betty," a movie starring Renée Zellweger that LaBute directed but did not script.
A response to that movie served as the inspiration for "This Is How It Goes." In the film, Morgan Freeman kisses Zellweger, which aroused the fury of one viewer, who wrote to complain about the interracial kiss. A copy of the letter is posted outside the theatre where "This Is How It Goes" is playing.
LaBute's upcoming work, "Some Girls," starring David Schwimmer and slated for a spring opening in London, will not be especially controversial, he says. "It's about a guy on the brink of getting married who tracks down his four previous girlfriends in an effort to rectify the mistakes he made with them. This is a story about a man who can't commit and is trying to clear the past before tackling the future."
The son of a truck driver, LaBute says his early ambition was "not to be a truck driver." He majored in theatre at Brigham Young University, with his sights set on writing and teaching careers. He earned a master's degree in playwriting from New York University.
LaBute garnered his controversial reputation early on with his play "Bash," a work examining infanticide among Mormons. The playwright, who is himself a Mormon—although no longer practicing—admits, "The play caused quite a ruckus in the Mormon Church, and it was touchy for me as a parent to write about infanticide. I feel everything is fair game in fiction, but it's very difficult to get to a place where you understand someone who kills a child."
LaBute made the transition into film by directing "In the Company of Men" on a shoestring budget and then moved on to helming scripts by other writers.
"There is a certain clarity when there is distance from the material," he points out, "in the same way a writer can be a good editor for someone else's work more so than for his. Sometimes a writer is just too close to his own work to view it dispassionately."
Whether he's wearing his writer or his writer-director hat, LaBute's ideal actor is "attractive, seductive, likeable, but able to turn emotionally on a dime."
And he has to be able to hold his own when breaking the fourth wall. As an example, LaBute cites Stiller's ease in "This Is How It Goes."
"Ben is so familiar to audiences that when he talks to them, on occasion they'll talk back," he notes. "At one performance, after giving his thesis on Cody—explaining that it's not that he's black but that he is a 'nigger'—one woman in the audience shouted back, 'You're full of shit.' Ben let a moment pass and then replied with his next line: 'The word nigger only has power if you let it.' " Even in retrospect, the playwright clearly admires Stiller's style, not to mention the appropriateness of the line.
LaBute hopes that audiences appreciate that the play's subject is not addressed in the theatre as often as it should be. And that is: "how we get along with each other, blacks and whites, men and women. I'd like audiences to leave the theatre feeling that the play has raised their consciousness, but deftly and with laughs. They should feel they've been at a three-card monte game, that where they started out is not where they ended up. This is what they've expected, but this is how it goes."
Sort of like life.