Last February, Neil LaBute was in the news when MCC Theater, with whom the playwright and screenwriter had enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship, abruptly canceled a production of his new play Reasons to be Pretty Happy and terminated his tenure as playwright in residence. No explanations were given, but coming at the height of the backlash launched by Harvey Weinstein’s disgrace, with accusations flying about the sexist and abusive behavior of men prominent in entertainment and media, there was a bit of prurient speculation—though notably, no allegations were forthcoming, even from reporters who had salivated over the downfall of others.
Nearly a year later, LaBute’s dismissal remains shrouded in mystery, and his body of work—marked by a refusal to pull punches in pondering male misconduct, and a keen eye for moral hypocrisy (and complexity) in general—seems not only pertinent but prophetic. If the fourth incarnation of LaBute New Theater Festival, a trio of short one-act plays now being presented by St. Louis Actors’ Studio, offers neither fodder for the salacious nor the gut punch and unlikely poignance of his best work, it’s a timely affirmation that LaBute remains among our most vital and necessary observers of messy modern life.
That timeliness extends to the subject matter of the new plays. The first, The Fourth Reich, is a monologue, tautly directed by John Pierson and launched with a simple fact of history, that “Hitler lost”—followed by the rather more subjective assertion that Der Führer consequently became “one of the most maligned people in the world.” Patrick Huber’s minimalist set design has the man speaking, Karl, seated beside a small table bearing a small framed painting—you can guess who the ostensible artist is—and a vase bearing a single, ironic flower. A beat later, Karl, asks, “Am I wrong about that or not? If I am, please, speak up.”
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
Several older audience members at the preview I attended did, and Eric Dean White, who plays Karl, engaged them with an earnest solicitousness he sustains throughout the piece, making his character at once funny, condescending and chilling. Karl first tells us he is French (setting up some trenchant observations about that country’s checkered track record), though his identity and motives become ever more suspect. It emerges that he, too, may be trying to rewrite his past, as he argues on behalf of “a man who said ‘yes I can’ and ‘yes I will’ at a time when no one else had the courage or the guts or the balls to do the same.” Parallels to the rhetoric of a current leader, much closer to home, are inescapable.
In the second play, Great Negro Works of Art, also helmed by Pierson, we meet Jerri, who is white, and Tom, who is black, on their first date, at a museum featuring the titular exhibit. Tom turns up carrying a small bouquet—a bad omen, given Reich‘s design—and makes a joking reference, during their awkward introductory pleasantries, to the animated cat and mouse who share their names. Jerri doesn’t get it, or much else, as the conversation quickly devolves into a series of miscues and unintentional (or not) offenses that illustrate, a bit overzealously, the tensions woven into interracial intercourse, even when it’s just verbal. Brenda Meaney and, especially, KeiLyn Durrel Jones do a fine job fielding the purposely, at times winningly uncomfortable comic jabs.
Unlikely Japan, another one-character piece, ends the collection on a high note, reminding us that LaBute’s female characters can be as sharply drawn and as vexing as his guys. Katie, a lovely young woman played by Gia Crovatin, is trying to come to terms with her lack of despair—that’s how she describes it initially, at least—after learning that someone she dated in high school was killed, apparently in the mass shooting at a Las Vegas concert that left more than 50 dead in 2017. It had been a decade since they were a couple when she discovered this, she points out, struggling to rationalize—to us, to herself—the sense of distance she feels. “People are getting shot and killed every single day” now, she adds.
It’s soon revealed, though, that there was someone else in Katie’s past—that as the now-dead beau was making big plans for the couple, she was carrying on with a slightly older man, a man with charisma and a job and a “beautiful car,” Crovatin’s Katie remembers, with a sly smile that may make you want to throw your program at her—not just for betraying a nice boy so unabashedly, but for making his murder, ultimately, all about her, as others with even less attachment to horrific events are prone to do in our increasingly fragmented, narcissistic digital age.
But LaBute, who also directs this closing play, and Crovatin’s beautifully shaded performance also let us see glimmers of real torment, of the humanity that still throbs in Katie, in all of us. “Stumbling forward through our lives, trying our best, sometimes failing, sometimes not, until we reach the end of it all,” she says finally. “Do you have the answers to all that…to any of it?” The question is rhetorical, and eternal—and it’s never been more pressing.
The LaBute New Theater Festival opened January 14, 2019, at the Davenport Theatre and runs through January 27. Tickets and information: telecharge.com
