You wouldn’t want to meet one of Neil LaBute’s plays in a bar, but the man
himself has the sort of big but easy presence that he rarely assigns to one
of his needy, needly characters. “Neil,” as one of his former London
producers has it, “is just a big teddy bear.”
He is certainly big, with grizzling curls and a round, receptive face
carefully concealed by glasses and a beard. But this teddy bear writes
ferocious and funny plays and films that include the casual account of
beating a gay man to death (Bash), a pregnant woman taking bloody
revenge on her adulterous husband (Helter Skelter), a pair of
businessmen seducing a deaf woman in order to destroy her (In the Company
of Men). Cuddly, huh?
The 45-year-old American has his characters’ propulsive way with words. But as
he eats his breakfast – egg and soldiers – in a café near to rehearsals in
Southwark, South London, he talks with all the self-knowledge that his
characters so sorely lack. If there’s a link between growing up in an
abusive household and then going on terrorise characters and audiences
alike, LaBute is wise to it.
He is in town to direct his play Fat Pig, which is, for LaButeland,
gentle terrain. True, it’s got a provocative name – “the title’s harsher
than the play itself,” he insists – and, true again, it’s got a provocative
premise: young-buck office worker Tom falls for obese librarian Helen, but
struggles to come to terms with how society will judge him for loving a
fatty. “But it’s a study in weakness more than anything,” LaBute says.
“The trick with the play is to make the audience feel they want this couple to
be together, but to remind them constantly that this is what life would be
like. Always showing Helen for who she is. A great woman, but this is what
she would look like in the bedroom, this is what she would look like at the
beach. I’m OK with that, but would you be?”
LaBute lost a chunk of weight once, he says, and found himself doing less
writing and more preening. But as he wrote Fat Pig, he found it
turning into another of the studies of male bluster that he’s been known for
ever since In the Company of Men made him a byword for whip-smart
misanthropy (misogyny, said some).
In subsequent plays such as Some Girl(s), This is How it Goesand Helter
Skelter,he’s become a grandmaster at writing boyish everymen who play
their good intentions as their get-out-of-jail-free card. They sound good,
they act bad. Or as Carter, Tom’s arsy coworker in Fat Pig, has
it: “Very rare is the dude who stands up for the shit he believes in.”
However gnarly his topic, LaBute writes in a vivid vernacular somewhere
between David Mamet and Friends. Fat Pig sugars his pill with
bright, brisk insults and intimacies alike. And he has cast four comedy
actors – Robert Webb, Ella Smith, Kris Marshall and Joanna Page – to keep
this feeling like a rom-com. “This play should be as funny as possible,” he
says, “because the painful bits will stick through anyway. Let the audience
think this is a really funny night at the theatre – and then make it all
come crashing down.”
Some writers talk about their stories in airy, almost abstract terms. LaBute
always talks in terms of the effect he wants to achieve – very much the
torture artist rather than the tortured artist. For his London production of The
Shape of Things, he played deafening rock music between scenes so the
audience would be isolated from each other, just as the male protagonist
Adam was isolated by his manipulative girlfriend Evelyn. For his Dublin
production of Bash, he got the American actor Jason Patric to address
his creepy monologue to one person in the crowd each night.
“I’m always looking for ways to make the experience . . . not unpleasurable,
but new and different,” he says. “Theatre is such a safe environment, in
theory, and I’ve always looked for ways to break that down. How do we make
it less safe?
I’m always looking for ways to make the audience drop their guard, to get them
a little closer to the stage, to get the music a little louder, to take away
the security blankets, take away the curtain call, take away the ending they
expect. And to me it’s not abusive, it’s just . . . contact.”
Throughout LaBute’s career, people have expressed surprise that a Mormon could
write such twisted drama – the Mormon Elders among them, who
“disfellowshipped” LaBute after Bash. But LaBute’s
interest in the exercise of power and the rockiness of relationships
predates his faith. He grew up in Spokane, Washington, the younger of two
brothers, with a truck-driver father whose temper cast a shadow on the
household.
“My father would change the atmosphere, and his home time was erratic. He
would come in any day at any time. That caused tension. And so I’m sure my
early interest in, What is the dynamic that is going on? How do people get
along? Can people ever live together? started right there.”
LaBute tried to do everything dad didn’t do. He went to a local
nondenominational church, even though neither parent was religious. He read
books, threw himself into his studies. “I liked being at school, and part of
that, in retrospect, was that I liked being out of the house! It was a safer
environment than it was at home.”
He won a scholarship to study at Brigham Young, a Mormon college in Utah. “So
off I went and became Mormon. I went into that, thinking, this group of
people are much more enjoyable to be around.”
There was always a tension between his work and his Mormonism. Now, after
years as a semidetached member, he has left the church, while his wife and
two children, aged 16 and 20 are still practising. Does that create a
conflict? LaBute looks uncomfortable.
“It’s easier now. There was a period where it was, ‘We don’t like what you
do.’ They’re told not to go see Rrated movies and their dad’s making Rrated
movies. How do you rectify that? My leaving the church was as much for them
as for me. It’s easier for them to say ‘My Dad’s not a Mormon’ than ‘My
Dad’s a bad Mormon’.”
Whatever his faith, LaBute has an almighty work ethic. While he’s in London
directing Fat Pig, his latest play Reasons to be Pretty opens
off-Broadway. Another play, In a Dark Dark House, opens at the
Almeida in London in November – but not before his film thriller Lakeview
Terrace opens in autumn.
He admits that his film career, studded as it is with adaptations (Possession,
The Wicker Man), may not be as singular as his plays. “A lot of my ideas
could have been films, but they probably would have been stacked up on my
desk, I’d never have got them made. Whereas the theatre embraces whatever it
is you want to try.”
LaBute’s wife, Lisa, is a psychotherapist – and he too has a therapist’s knack
for uncovering how language both reveals and camouflage our intentions. “I
try to create believable psychological portraits of people,” he says, “it’s
just that my people happen not to be real. I’m a psychologist for people who
aren’t there. As a film director, you’re a prisoner of finance, the schedule
of actors, striking unions. As a playwright I can chug along. And that’s
where I’m happiest, in the dark, working on the world of these people who
don’t exist.”
Fat Pig is previewing at the Trafalgar Studios, London SW1 (www.theambassadors.com/trafalgarstudios
0870 0606632), and opens on May 27 2008
