Playwright Neil LaBute earned a bad boy reputation early on, putting the spotlight on the extremely politically incorrect, while challenging audiences - and critics - along the way.
In Vices & Virtues, his newest effort running at Profiles Theater, LaBute also stretches the performance format, queuing up twelve one-act 'playlets,' each with separate cast and directors, served up in two courses, intended to be viewed in two evenings.
It it fun? In a word, yes. These bite-size theatrical plot lines are delicious, and laced with LaBute's signature sinister layer. The plot is sketched in inferences, as characters (the script calls some just "A" or "man") deliver commonplaces, then with an insidious slip of the tongue drop bombshells:
In Kandahar, a lone soldier addressing at length an unseen inquiry panel, dispassionately describes in gruesome detail the jealous rage in which he bayoneted his wife and shot up a soldier he suspected of being her lover.
In 10K, a young father (Tom McGregor) encounters and joins for an impromptu a young mother (Betsy Bowman, awesomely weird in the role), who reveals unsettling details: she leaves her two-year-old home alone while running and shopping ("Is that horrible?" she asks); she may fancy calling a plumber over for sex. They almost pair up, but decide to leave it as a fantasy - for the moment, anyway.
I'm Going to Stop Pretending finds two women at the end of a relationship. Why has it failed? We learn, eventually, the she (Brookelyn Hebert) was once a he, who changed sex to win other woman (Marie Wiegle) - a lesbian. The relationship fails when the object of his desire finally decides that she just doesn't like him (now her) as a person.
Fans of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf will relish The Great War. A couple meet to split their property following the divorce. After some bitter, bitter cruel jousting, they both discover neither wants custody of their two young children, ages 8 and 10: "They will always be C students, and they will die of heart disease in their mid-60s," says the anything but doting mother. "I don't want them." Elizabeth Birnkrant is deliciously vicious; Brian Goodman plays the hapless schmuck.
LaBute may want to trim a minute or two from some of these pieces, which sometimes continued to hammer home their point well after it was delivered. But his star-power is clearly a performer magnet, with 20 screen-ready actors, all, really, so very good, and giving it their all. It's hard to imagine Hollywood won't be scouting this show. You should be, too.
But four hours - two nights - in the theater is a big commitment. If you have to choose one, the Virtues set is a better value on a cost per character basis: eleven performers, versus nine actors in the Vices set.
Virtues also carries a likely portrait of the playwright in Swallowing Bicycles, about a scriptwriter battling a producer; and Good Luck in Farsi a backstage drama about mean-spirited competition between two actresses (Sarah Brooks and Sarah Ruggles) vying for the same role. But Vices wins out for sheer intensity and more fully realized characters.
One may ask how much LaBute is too much. It wasn't. That is a testament - or really, a verification - that this is a serious playwright, whose work carries some of that flavor of Albee, Pinter, Miller, if the finest moments of these 11 works ultimately is distilled further.
The audience is a party to a worthwhile experiment. The star power of LaBute, an accomplished screenwriter and even a bit of a Hollywood force, drew top talent to this effort. And they delivered. It's definitely recommended for those who love a real theater event.
