REVIEWS ...
Monday, November 11, 2002
Manipulative twentysomething stirs up 'The Shape of Things'
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
When playwright-filmmaker Neil LaBute turns to the question, "What is art?," you can predict two things about his answer: It will entertain and disturb you.
The man behind such troubling, absorbing movies as In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, the playwright who devised the trio of unsettling plays that make up bash, is a craftsman who knows how to hook an audience, push its buttons and send it home both stirred and shaken.
And as anyone who has been to GableStage knows, such plays are right up director Joseph Adler's alley. The daring company at the Biltmore Hotel does most theater well, but what it does best is on display now in LaBute's mesmerizing, ferocious The Shape of Things.
The play's four twentysomething characters, all college students in a conservative midwestern town, are trying to cram academics, jobs, love and meaning into hectic lives.
The focal couple, Adam (Terrell Hardcastle) and Evelyn (Claire Tyler), meet not-so-cute: He's at one of his two jobs, working as a museum guard, when he discovers her ready to restore a nude statue's hidden manhood with spray paint. After some bantering, nervous exchanges, Adam asks for Evelyn's number. What he doesn't discover until way too late is that she already has his.
Adam has long seen himself as nothing special. But he works to improve himself -- eating better, working out, trading glasses for contacts -- in order to keep stoking the fires of a torrid affair. He sees Evelyn as utterly captivating: smart, provocative, fearless, irresistible. What we see is a manipulative young woman who is more than a little scary.
Adam's former roommate Phillip (Laif Gilbertson) and his fiancee, Jenny (Autumn Horne), also wander into Evelyn's web. They discover, at great personal cost, that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander in Evelyn's life.
The Shape of Things is improbably funny, even near its sobering surprise ending. It is also sexy, hot (there is nudity) and laced with vulgarities.
The performances, especially by Tyler and Hardcastle, are passionate and finely honed. Jeff Quinn's sliding Mondrian-style panels look busy but prove efficient at suggesting the play's many locations. Michael J. Hoffman's sound is artful too: Between-scenes music blasts so that you can't discuss what Evelyn might be up to, and a slight echo suggests the vastness of both the museum and a lecture hall. Daniela Schwimmer's costumes are age-appropriate and character-revealing, particularly Evelyn's eccentric ones.
Working with LaBute's provocative material, Adler sculpts The Shape of Things into must-see stage art.
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
From the gritty hands of Neil LaBute, a twisted love story
By Jack Zink, Theater Writer
Adam is a nice guy, a little overweight and socially unskilled, but workable boyfriend material. Evelyn notices all that, so when he ventures out of his cocoon in her direction, she accepts the invitation.
In Neil LaBute's vivid drama The Shape of Things now at the GableStage, this couple will explore all the crossroads and confront the roadblocks of a young, passionate relationship. For Adam, romance is mixed with obsession. For Evelyn, the attraction is tinged with determination; she wants her beau to be everything he can be.
LaBute is best known for his movies In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty and the recent Possession. He also wrote bash, a trio of short plays done with gritty style last year by Miami's Juggerknot Theatre Company.
The Shape of Things depicts the push-pull of a budding relationship, when the territory is uncertain and the process is a seesaw of discovery and adaptation.
The situations themselves appear mundane for too long after Adam and Evelyn first hook up, but put up with them for a little while: LaBute is using them to set us up for a turn as surprising and ferocious as any that David Mamet can concoct.
Terrell Hardcastle portrays Adam with the eagerness and unguarded emotion of a puppy. Claire Tyler conveys the fiery artistic temperament of Evelyn, who first shows up at a museum to deliver a bold critique of a semi-nude statue. Adam, the sheepish guard, asks her out.
Both are students at a small college in a small, plain-Jane Midwestern town. Soon after they begin their torrid affair, Adam introduces Evelyn to his friends Philip (Laif Gilbertson) and Jenny (Autumn Horne), also students and engaged to be married. They notice that Adam is changing -- he's slimmed down, become more stylish. Evelyn notices that Adam's pals fit in with his former go-nowhere nerd mentality.
The Shape of Things plays out over nine mostly crackling scenes in a little over an hour and a half. Tension is heightened by Jeff Quinn's lighting and set, the latter a series of large colorful panels whose different arrangements around campus-chic props represent a variety of locales. Daniela Schwimmer's costumes accentuate the gulf between grunge and hip, and Michael J. Hoffman's heavy metal soundtrack echoes the power plays going on in the script.
Sparks fly, all of them highlighted by director Joseph Adler's edgy direction of a play that's not for honeymooners or the easily offended. Yet the nudity and coarse language aren't as unsettling as the nature of the relationship itself. LaBute surreptitiously uses love as a metaphor for art and sculpts a provocative argument about the potential for abuse.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
In the Company of Bad
Neil LaBute once again looks at the shape of ugly things in a funny way
BY RONALD MANGRAVITE
When a play by Neil LaBute hits town, any town, the specifics of the production usually take a back seat to the force of the writer's personality. LaBute's plays and films are biting, challenging, often cruel -- and by comparison, most other scripts seem bland and polite. His debut film In the Company of Men, which he adapted and directed from his stage play, had to do with the cruel games two businessmen play on a cheerful deaf woman. His second, also drawing from his stage work, Your Friends and Neighbors, was another tale of ruthless power and twisted revenge. Acknowledging his debt to the scabrous comedies of the English Restoration, LaBute makes war on the bland and the polite and when the smoke clears, the scene is never pretty and justice is rarely done.
Case in point is The Shape of Things, a clever, subtle exercise in artful cruelty now in its Florida premiere at GableStage. Adam (Terrell Hardcastle) is a nerdy, out-of-shape literature major at a small college in a conservative Midwestern town. To make ends meet he works at several jobs, one being a guard at a local art museum. Just as his shift ends one day he encounters Evelyn (Claire Tyler), an enticing, brainy art theory grad student who has just stepped over the velvet ropes of a sculpture intent on defacing it with spray paint. Adam is charged with maintaining order, but she maintains her goal is a liberating act of creativity. Adam soldiers on, intent on stopping vandalism, but before he knows it, he's totally smitten by anarchic, free-spirited Evelyn. Instead of throwing her out he asks for her phone number, and she complies by spray-painting it on the inside of his overcoat.
That's a mighty peculiar way to start a romance, but then Evelyn's a mighty peculiar gal. She turns him on to some wild sex and videotapes their carnal acrobatics. He's taken aback but secretly thrilled. Soon she has him working out, shedding pounds, gaining a flashier wardrobe and haircut, and assuming a more assertive man-about-town stance. He even agrees to a minor nose job at her urging. His metamorphosis is not lost on his brash, bossy friend Phillip (Laif Gilbertson) or Phillip's fiancée, Jenny (Autumn Horne), who happens to be Adam's erstwhile flame, a girl he adored from afar but could never approach for lack of courage.
The new-model Adam takes Evelyn to meet Phillip and Jenny, as the latter plan their wedding. Suddenly a very uncomfortable four-way dance begins. For starters Phillip and Evelyn loathe one another. Worse, Jenny and Adam like one another -- which is not only terribly inconvenient, but it's clear to both that they, two shy, polite people, are made for each other. They fight it for a time, but their attraction leads to a kiss and that leads to, well, suffice it to say that the story could turn ugly if Evelyn finds out, and she does and it does.
All the while Adam finds he has to lie and then lie and lie some more just to keep up appearances. The result is a mordantly funny stage noir, as the hapless Adam finds that Evelyn is an Eve with more than a little evil in her.
Like all of LaBute's work, The Shape of Things is an unsettling blend of ferocity, humor, sex, and ideas; in other words, precisely the sort of show that's right up GableStage's alley. Joe Adler directs with his usual clarity of staging and trust in his acting ensemble. The young company brings together some GableStage veterans with some newcomers. Laif Gilbertson does well as the manipulative, edgy Phillip. As Adam, Hardcastle clearly delineates Adam's romantic dilemmas and his ensuing ethical ones. So, too, does Horne as Jenny, a sweet, ordinary young woman whose struggle between her innate propriety and her sudden desire for Adam puts her into a panic. All three get a workout as the story mixes and matches them in a series of two-character scenes.
But as Evelyn, Tyler seems out of step with the rest of the ensemble. Tyler, so successful as the quirky android in Comic Potential at the Actors Playhouse, seems unwilling or unable to shake that character, playing Evelyn with the same physicality and vocal inflections, the same blank stare, that seems at decided odds with the tightly wound, intellectually superior personality Evelyn is revealed to be. Sure, this might be Evelyn's intended disguise, but if so, Tyler never gets down to what may be going on underneath. While it is certainly true that LaBute is unconcerned with what motivates his characters to behave the way they do, nevertheless Tyler's take seems rather simplistic, and what could and probably should be a tour de force performance feels more competent than compelling.
Adler's regular production team provides its usual solid design support. Jeff Quinn's colorful set, a series of sliding screens that echo Mondrian's geometric paintings, are simple and effective. The same can be said of Daniela Schwimmer's idiosyncratic, character-revealing costumes, though Adam's sartorial transformation seems less striking than the text suggests.
While the production merits praise, it's the writer's rush of ideas and ethical dilemmas that makes the biggest impact, a wholly original voice in the modern theater (and in film, for that matter). LaBute's own story is highly original, too. Born in Detroit, raised in Spokane, he ended up going to college as a non-Mormon at predominately Mormon Brigham Young University. There he became a Mormon and remains one today, living with his wife and children in Indiana. It's unclear from precisely where LaBute draws his inspiration, but his enduring fascination with the ugly impulses that bubble up beneath social niceties, his middle American characters, and his lack of pat answers remain his signature preoccupations.
LaBute takes a long, hard look at evil, how it works its power and how human beings make little bargains with it every day. His central characters are usually likable, flawed nobodies who never think they will be called to make major ethical choices in the course of their daily lives. But he seems to remind us over and over that it's the little choices that lead up to big ones. Most of American writing follows the Hollywood party line, that people may err but recognizing one's fault leads to redemption. LaBute isn't interested in redemption or even much explanation. People do cruel things to one another and sometimes the wrong people pay the price. To LaBute that's the American way because that's the way of the world.
