by Neil LaBute
PRAISE FOR THE PLAYS OF NEIL LABUTE
THE WAY WE GET BY
“It’s sexy, it’s starry … dangerously irresistible.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“The Way We Get By has an unexpected sweetness, along with a twist.”
—Jennifer Farrar, The Associated Press
“The Way We Get By feels like a refreshingly sunnier and more hopeful LaBute, with moments that feel suspiciously like giddy joy.”
—Sara Vilkomerson, Entertainment Weekly
“Viscerally romantic, almost shockingly sensitive, even, dare we say it, sweet … LaBute … dares here to explore less obviously explosive territory. Yet, somehow, this daring feels deep.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
THE MONEY SHOT
“A wickedly funny new comedy.”
—Jennifer Farrar, The Associated Press
“An acid-tongued showbiz satire.”
—Scott Foundas, Variety
“Fresh, joyously impolite … a good and mean little farce.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
“100 minutes of rapid-fire bursts of raucous laughter.”
—Michael Dale, BroadwayWorld
“Packs a stunning amount of intelligence into 100 minutes of delectable idiocy.”
—Hayley Levitt, TheaterMania
“Consistently entertaining … To his credit, LaBute does not aim for the obvious metaphor: in showbiz, everyone gets screwed. He is more concerned with amusing us.”
—Brendan Lemon, Financial Times
REASONS TO BE HAPPY
“Mr. LaBute is more relaxed as a playwright than he’s ever been. He is clearly having a good time revisiting old friends … you’re likely to feel the same way … the most winning romantic comedy of the summer, replete with love talk, LaBute-style, which isn’t so far from hate talk …”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“These working-class characters are in fine, foul-mouthed voice, thanks to the scribe’s astonishing command of the sharp side of the mother tongue. But this time the women stand up for themselves and give as good as they get.”
—Marilyn Stasio, Variety
“LaBute has a keen ear for conversational dialogue in all its profane, funny and inelegant glory.”
—Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
“LaBute … nails the bad faith, the grasping at straws, the defensive barbs that mark a tasty brawl.”
—Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post
“Intense, funny, and touching … In following up with the lives of his earlier characters, LaBute presents another compassionate examination of the ways people struggle to connect and try to find happiness.”
—Jennifer Farrar, The Associated Press
“Terrifically entertaining.”
—Philip Boroff, Bloomberg
“A triumph … always electric with life. LaBute has a terrific way of demonstrating that even in their direst spoken punches … fighting lovers are hilarious.… completely convincing.”
—David Finkle, Huffington Post
REASONS TO BE PRETTY
“Mr. LaBute is writing some of the freshest and most illuminating American dialogue to be heard anywhere these days … Reasons flows with the compelling naturalness of overheard conversation.… It’s never easy to say what you mean, or to know what you mean to begin with. With a delicacy that belies its crude vocabulary, Reasons to be Pretty celebrates the everyday heroism in the struggle to find out.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“There is no doubt that LaBute knows how to hold an audience.… LaBute proves just as interesting writing about human decency as when he is writing about the darker urgings of the human heart.”
—Charles Spencer, Telegraph
“Funny, daring, thought-provoking …”
—Sarah Hemming, Financial Times
IN A DARK DARK HOUSE
“Refreshingly reminds us … that [LaBute’s] talents go beyond glibly vicious storytelling and extend into thoughtful analyses of a world rotten with original sin.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“LaBute takes us to shadowy places we don’t like to talk about, sometimes even to think about …”
—Erin McClam, Newsday
WRECKS
“Superb and subversive … A masterly attempt to shed light on the ways in which we manufacture our own darkness. It offers us the kind of illumination that Tom Stoppard has called ‘what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.’”
—John Lahr, The New Yorker
“A tasty morsel of a play … The profound empathy that has always informed LaBute’s work, even at its most stringent, is expressed more directly and urgently than ever here.”
—Elysa Gardner, USA Today
“Wrecks is bound to be identified by its shock value. But it must also be cherished for the moment-by-moment pleasure of its masterly portraiture. There is not an extraneous syllable in LaBute’s enormously moving love story.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
FAT PIG
“The most emotionally engaging and unsettling of Mr. LaBute’s plays since bash … A serious step forward for a playwright who has always been most comfortable with judgmental distance.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“One of Neil LaBute’s subtler efforts … Demonstrates a warmth and compassion for its characters missing in many of LaBute’s previous works [and] balances black humor and social commentary in a … beautifully written, hilarious … dissection of how societal pressures affect relationships [that] is astute and up-to-the-minute relevant.”
—Frank Scheck, New York Post
THE DISTANCE FROM HERE
“LaBute gets inside the emptiness of American culture, the masquerade, and the evil of neglect. The Distance From Here, it seems to me, is a new title to be added to the short list of important contemporary plays.”
—John Lahr, The New Yorker
THE MERCY SEAT
“Though set in the cold, gray light of morning in a downtown loft with inescapable views of the vacuum left by the twin towers, The Mercy Seat really occurs in one of those feverish nights of the soul in which men and women lock in vicious sexual combat, as in Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“A powerful drama … LaBute shows a true master’s hand in gliding us amid the shoals and reefs of a mined relationship.”
—Donald Lyons, New York Post
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
“LaBute … continues to probe the fascinating dark side of individualism … [His] great gift is to live in and to chronicle that murky area of not-knowing, which mankind spends much of its waking life denying.”
—John Lahr, The New Yorker
“LaBute is the first dramatist since David Mamet and Sam Shepard—since Edward Albee, actually—to mix sympathy and savagery, pathos and power.”
—Donald Lyons, New York Post
“Shape … is LaBute’s thesis on extreme feminine wiles, as well as a disquisition on how far an artist … can go in the name of art … Like a chiropractor of the soul, LaBute is looking for realignment, listening for a crack.”
—John Istel, Elle
BASH
“The three stories in bash are correspondingly all, in different ways, about the power instinct, about the animalistic urge for control. In rendering these narratives, Mr. LaBute shows not only a merciless ear for contemporary speech but also a poet’s sense of recurring, slyly graduated imagery … darkly engrossing.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
ALSO BY NEIL LABUTE
FICTION
>
Seconds of Pleasure: Stories
SCREENPLAYS
In the Company of Men
Your Friends and Neighbors
ADAPTATIONS
Miss Julie
Woyzeck
PLAYS
bash: three plays
The Mercy Seat
The Distance From Here
The Shape of Things
Fat Pig
Autobahn
This Is How It Goes
Some Girl(s)
Wrecks and Other Plays
In a Dark Dark House
Reasons to be Pretty
Filthy Talk for Troubled Times and Other Plays
The Break of Noon
Lovely Head and Other Plays
Reasons to be Happy
In a Forest, Dark and Deep
Some Velvet Morning
Things We Said Today: Short Plays and Monologues
The Money Shot
The Way We Get By
NEIL LABUTE is an award-winning playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter. His plays include: bash, The Shape of Things, The Distance From Here, The Mercy Seat, Fat Pig (Olivier Award nominated for Best Comedy), Some Girl(s), Reasons to be Pretty (Tony Award nominated for Best Play), In a Forest, Dark and Deep, a new adaptation of Miss Julie, and Reasons to be Happy. He is also the author of Seconds of Pleasure, a collection of short fiction, and a 2013 recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Neil LaBute’s film and television work includes In the Company of Men (New York Critics’ Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmaker Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival), Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things, Lakeview Terrace, Death at a Funeral, Some Velvet Morning, Ten x Ten, Dirty Weekend, Full Circle, and Billy & Billie.
Copyright
CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that all plays in this book, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. The stock and amateur performance rights in the English language throughout the United States, and its territories and possessions, Canada, and the Open Market are controlled by the Gersh Agency, 41 Madison Avenue, 33rd Floor, New York, New York, 10010. No professional or nonprofessional performances of the plays herein (excluding first-class professional performance) maybe given without obtaining in advance the written permission of the Gersh Agency and paying the requisite fee. Inquiries concerning all other rights should be addressed to the Gersh Agency.
This edition first published in the United States in 2015 by
Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 2015 by Neil LaBute
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-1653-7
for emma sulkowicz and paul nungesser
“people change and forget to tell each other …”
—lillian hellman
PREFACE
Let’s call this collection “the wild bunch.”
The bastard’s dozen (in folklore a dozen that is missing one) that makes up this collection is a motley crew at best—not unlike Sam Peckinpah’s band of doomed outlaws made famous in his 1969 bloodbath of a film. These eleven plays and monologues have been a part of my life for a few years now—most of them, anyway—and have been waiting for a literary home. The works in this short stack you have before you have all come from a variety of strange little foster homes called “one-act festivals” or theatrical partnerships like AdA (an international collaboration between myself and the Italian playwright/director Marco Calvani) or the like. They were usually given quick births since these kinds of opportunities often spring up at the last moment or with hardly any time to prepare, but I suppose that’s part of what makes them such tough little rascals to begin with.
I am proud of these runts—many have been written to fit a theme like “desire” or “censorship” or that kind of thing, or with the directive to create “terror” in the minds and hearts of the audience. A lot of times this has been fun to do since I’m not really someone who tends to be a thematic writer when left to my own devices. That’s not to say that a theme (or more than one) doesn’t usually find its way into my work along the way, but I rarely (if ever) set out to write a play based on a thematic impulse. I don’t write about “race” but instead write about a mixed-race marriage that begins to have troubles. Therefore, to be given a theme ahead of time or a mission such as “scare the shit out of the audience” is like a mini-vacation for a writer who doesn’t think that way. That said, it’s not always easy. The short form is a real bitch (and don’t threaten me with that old “sexist” label again—you know as well as I do that boys can be bitches, too). It’s such a blast when you get it right and people always think it’s easy to write a few pages and make them great—any time someone does something well it makes the casual onlooker believe that the act itself is easy—but I’m here to tell you that this is just not the case. Like all my other writing, it’s hard work but you just have to get in there and get it done. There’s no shortcuts and no magic tricks, no little elves who come at night and do the deed for you. When you’re a writer, you write. You don’t talk about it, you write. Let the writing speak for itself and don’t explain it anywhere but on the page.
Writers write. Talkers talk. It’s that simple.
10K is the most recent piece in the collection. It was written for the “Summer Shorts” program that is under the direction of J.J. Kandel, whom I’ve been lucky to work with for the past seven seasons. He’s a tireless producer and actor who has brought two of my characters in Exhibit ‘A’ to life (the “Man” in 10K and the other was in the short play Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush in its New York premiere) along with a spurned young lover in a previous play of mine called The Furies. I got the chance to direct 10K as well, with J.J. and Clea Alsip (a terrific young actress) and we had a great time bringing the main action of the play to life. It’s really fun to watch an act as realistic as “running” become so theatrical on the stage; by the time we were in performance both actors sounded more like athletes than actors as they nursed their aching legs each night. Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was exactly the opposite situation—two actors sat on benches for most of the performance and held an increasingly tense conversation about children and abuse. I was lucky enough to have one of the best stage actors in New York working on yet another play of mine and facing J.J. again (they worked together on The Furies): Victor Slezak. I can’t say enough about the work of Mr. Slezak. A paragraph wouldn’t do it. A book wouldn’t be enough. Suffice it to say that he has breathed life into both men and monsters for me, and he’s made them beautiful and horrifying in equal measure; he makes each character he plays matter and that’s all you can ever ask of any acto
r.
The pieces included here that were part of the AdA project—I’m Going To Stop Pretending (That I Didn’t Break Your Heart) and Happy Hour—had a very lively route to the stage. This edition of AdA (2014) was the second go-round for Mr. Calvani and me. It’s a project in which we each write new texts and then direct each other’s work. We started the project in Venice this time around, at their Theater Biennale, and that’s where an Italian cast worked on my I’m Going To Stop Pretending (That I Didn’t Break Your Heart) and presented a workshopped staging of it. When it was time to bring the AdA project to New York at the La MaMa facilities, however, we opted to perform a different play instead. This was Happy Hour, a new and revitalized version of an earlier play of mine called A Guy Walks Into a Bar. I’ve added new material to it and got the ending right this time around. Marco was blessed with the real-life couple of Jennifer Mudge and Chris Henry Coffey as performers and the audience was lucky enough to watch two peerless actors make dramatic love on stage, night after night.
The Unimaginable and Some White Chick were plays written for a shorts fest in London that carried the sobering moniker of “TERROR!” For two years running I was asked to try and really frighten an audience and these two plays were the best I could do. I wanted to create everyday fiends, not some slobbering ghouls or things that go bump in the night. I’m not afraid of vampires and werewolves—I fear the people around me who steal children or find pleasure in the pain and suffering of others. These two little playlets are the results of my fears as a man and a father and a person living in a beautiful world that is peopled with folks that I want to trust but who can’t always be trusted. Hey, read the papers—any day’s headlines will put my little ghost stories to shame.
The titular play was an invitation to respond to specific bits of censorship that were going on in the U.S. and abroad. Exhibit ‘A’ is an obvious nod to the ill-fated “Exhibit B” art project that was kept from being exhibited in London. I wrote this piece for a group called Theatre Uncut, whom I’ve worked with several times before and, more specifically, for the theater director Cressida Brown. I was trying to push the limits of this formal exercise—what a surprise!—and show the audience how complicit it can be in an act of abuse as long as someone makes sure to call it “art.” I wanted to put the artist under the microscope as much as those who censor and ask one simple question: “Is everything ‘art’ as long as somebody calls it that?” I certainly have an opinion on the subject and I imagine anyone reading this does as well. That’s what makes the subject so damn fascinating, I suppose. “Art.” Just ask Emma Sulkowicz and Paul Nungesser for their repective definitions of “art” sometime and you’ll see what I mean.