Neil LaBute is our best contemporary investigator of human cruelty. It's there in his films — in the way two young businessmen set out to dupe and humiliate a deaf woman in In the Company of Men and in the rhapsodic recounting of a homosexual rape by a middle-class sadist in Your Friends and Neighbors. It's in his best plays — in the murder of a child that a young woman commits to spite her ex-lover in bash, and in the way another woman viciously turns her clueless boyfriend into the subject of a college art project in The Shape of Things.
When LaBute focuses on his favorite subject, his work is riveting, shocking, and disturbingly relevant. We can't help but be transfixed by people without our scruples, people who ignore the obligations of civilized life and administer pain without regret. Sure, we've learned to suppress such abusive instincts, but as Carl Jung taught us, suppressed doesn't mean excised. Our banished self is still kicking in the cellar of consciousness. And just when we thought we'd learned to tune it out completely, Neil LaBute comes along and makes us confront it again in its all-too-recognizable ugliness. But not all LaBute is equally scorching. For instance, the second of bash's three one-acts is merely predictable, and The Mercy Seat, which takes place in the New York City of 9/11, is overdone and unremarkable.
And then there's autobahn, the LaBute play currently being produced at Gulfport's Art Village Courtyard by the new Cruciverbalist Collective. Though the show is, for the most part, solidly acted, these seven one-acts come across as LaBute Lite, a mild concoction without the razor edge that we've come to expect from our meanest playwright.
Yes, there are a couple of winners among these seven sketches, but LaBute doesn't aim for much here besides some minor insights into human failings. Even the idea of placing each scene in a car seems inessential: Many of these encounters would work as well in a diner, or a hotel lobby, or a living room. So we come away from autobahn somewhat entertained, somewhat stimulated, but not nearly as stunned as LaBute's better work has taught us to expect. Call it the curse of success: Knowing LaBute's capacities, we can't help but be disappointed when he doesn't live up to them.
Still, the show includes two memorable one-acts. Best of all is the sketch called autobahn, about two foster parents who have just returned their son to a Boy's Home after a series of dangerous escapades including car theft and bringing a handgun to school. As the wife (played movingly by Susan Demers) tries to convince her silent husband (Rand Smith) and herself that they've made the only thinkable choice, we discover that the boy is claiming that he was sexually abused by his foster father.
The power of the scene is all in the psychology of the parents: her desperate attempt not to feel like a failure, and his mute denial of an accusation that could conceivably wreck his life. Making a German autobahn a metaphor for a trouble-free life doesn't quite work, but the scene nevertheless presents us with complicated people facing a disturbing past and an uncertain future. And as a character study, it's exceedingly satisfying.
Road trip works for a different reason: It's about the act of receiving information in the theater, about the detective work that an audience engages in while trying to make sense of a play. A man (Smith again) and a young girl (the impressive Leah Radel) are taking a cross-country trip. At first we don't know who the man is — her father, some other relative? — and we can't quite decide whether the girl is a willing or unwilling fellow traveler.
Slowly we gain knowledge. The girl, we discover, made a scene at a rest stop, fighting the man and refusing to go with him; she informs him that she plays soccer in the summer, something a parent would surely already know. The place that they're going to is a secluded cabin, near a body of water where, he reminds her, she can swim naked. By the end of the scene we know exactly who the man is, and we have a very good idea of his intentions — and they're not honorable. This is a cleverly constructed scene, and, at its end, a chilling one.
The same can't be said about the other five plays, though each of them is at least mildly intriguing. Funny is about a girl (nicely played by Rebecca Caudill) who's just left a rehab facility, and is being driven home by her mother (Demers). The girl tells her mother that she fully intends to start using drugs again; beyond this and her admission that even in rehab she smoked marijuana, there's little about the scene that merits our reflection.
Bench seat is about a young man (well-portrayed by Rob Glidden) who's parked at a spot where his date (Carol Robinson) was once dumped by another man. As she tries to transcend her anxiety that she'll be dropped in the same place twice, she lets her current beau know that she can be mercilessly vindictive. We leave the young couple not quite sure how their affair will develop — and not, to be honest, terribly curious. The young man is in a fix; but there's not much reason to care about either character.
A more ambitious scene is all apologies, in which a foul-mouthed husband (Jimmy Chang) tries to blame the history of language for leading him to call his wife (Robinson) a "cunt" at the local Albertson's. The problem here is that we never accept the husband's — and LaBute's — contention that Language with a capital L is responsible for his sins — this guy is just bad-mannered, and would find cuss-words in a monastery.
Merge is an overlong scene in which a man (persuasively played by Stuart Jonap) tries to learn whether his wife (Mary Ross) invited two or more men up to her room during a convention (Pinter handled the same basic theme much more brilliantly in The Collection). And long division concerns a male friend (Glidden) who tries tediously and at too great length to convince his recently spurned buddy (Chang) to barge into his ex-girlfriend's house and retrieve his Nintendo 64 game console. The scene, like its subject, is utterly trivial.
Still, there's some good news: The outdoor Art Village Courtyard makes a fine setting for theater, and the autobahn set — uncredited in my program — looks enough like a car's interior to give the drivers with a wheel to turn and keep the passengers mostly immobilized beside them.
Six different directors — Colleen Coughenour, Nonie White, Steve Mountan, Ross, Demers and Chang — all turn in sturdy work, and the uncredited costumes make sense in each scene. Best of all, this Cruciverbalist production — only its second ever — feels professional. I'm already eager to see what they'll do next.
I have a feeling — in spite of my disaffection with much of autobahn — that they're eventually going to bring us some truly important works of theater.
This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2006.