REVIEWS ...
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Tale of deceit and racism -- with dabs of humor
Neil LaBute tackles racism and lies in a seductive stage portrait of small-town men up to no good.
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Folks who prefer the equivalent of vanilla ice cream when they go to the theater -- mild, sweet, goes down easy -- should run like hell if anyone suggests catching the new production of Neil LaBute's This Is How It Goes at GableStage.
LaBute, the filmmaker and playwright behind such unsettling works as In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things, is from the take-no-prisoners school of play writing. This Is How It Goes, which premiered at New York's Public Theater in 2005, is both sporadically funny and undeniably involving.
It's not painful to watch, exactly, but it sure is intense.
For a taut 90 minutes, the narrator (Todd Allen Durkin) spins a story of long-smoldering lust, sexist deceit and racism. He acknowledges that we are watching -- and judging -- him, and that he may well be an "unreliable narrator." So we can't say we weren't warned, that perhaps not everything happened the way he's telling it.
Under murky circumstances, our narrator (LaBute simply calls him Man) winds up back in the same small town where he grew up. He is divorced, no longer working as a lawyer, father to a young daughter who seems not to matter much to him.
By chance, he runs into Belinda (Beth McIntosh), the willowy blond ex-cheerleader he once adored. She's a mom of two, married to a former star athlete. Cody (Brandon Morris) has become a successful businessman, though he's less than exemplary as a husband. He is also black, a fact that seems both crucial and incendiary.
This Is How It Goes is all about shock, about the bald revelation of prejudice. Under Joseph Adler's tonally astute direction, it first seduces us, then slams us back in our seats. Durkin masterfully establishes himself as flawed but likable, so that when he finally utters several shockingly racist lines, your reaction to him is complicated. That's what LaBute wants: not black-and-white, but shades of gray.
Morris and McIntosh play with complexity, too. Is Cody abusive? Too demanding? Duplicitous? Is Belinda a victim? Manipulative in her own way? Vulnerable to seduction?
Lacing his script with references that include William Shakespeare's Othello and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, LaBute paints yet another portrait of colluding men behaving badly.
But just like designer Lyle Baskin, whose simple set with its pattern of abstract swirls takes on the bright greens, purples and golds of Jeff Quinn's lighting, LaBute paints very, very effectively.
Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
GableStage adds fuel to LaBute's incendiary study of racism and relationships
By Bill Hirschman
Here's an endearing nebbish who reminds you of Tom Hanks, suddenly delivering the most reprehensible racist comments with a blitheness that makes the obscenity of it all the more chilling.
But whipping the audience with incendiary racism is not the overarching point of GableStage's solidly executed This Is How It Goes. Certainly, a secondary theme is that corrosive racial attitudes lie just a few millimeters below the veneer of contemporary life.
But director Joe Adler, a superb trio of actors and playwright Neil LaBute aim higher, broader and deeper. It's the sense that truth is nearly impossible to pin down in a modern world where perception is colored by prejudice, desire and the tendency to see what you want to see.
This Is How It Goes presents a genial man returning to his small hometown after a marriage and career implode in the big city. He seeks out the blond cheerleader he had a crush on in high school. But he finds her trapped in a disintegrating marriage to the jock they knew in school -- a black track star turned successful businessman whose radar for slights is tuned to the ultra-sensitive setting. When the couple invite the protagonist to live in the garage apartment behind their home, tensions ratchet up as love and hate in various definitions chafe against each other, in what goes beyond a love triangle.
Like LaBute's The Shape of Things, this is an onion-peeling play in which compass settings and the moral high ground shift with every scene. Yet Adler nails the ever-morphing tone as the kaleidoscope twists. Take the opening meeting of two acquaintances clumsily struggling to reconnect out of simple courtesy, something goofily innocent and naturalistic. Compare it to the blood-freezing monologue that closes the play after we have eaten all kinds of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
Under Adler, the skilled cast not only strikes nuances of character but also underscores LaBute's contention that no one here is completely blameless nor -- and this is a serious acting challenge by the finale -- completely blameworthy. Todd Allen Durkin, having one of the best years of his career, adds a complex portrait of your next-door neighbor who puts his foot in his mouth occasionally but who harbors dark wheels within wheels. Beth McIntosh, Carbonell-nominated as a teenage groupie in Brooklyn Boy, transforms into a downtrodden housewife. Brandon Morris has the hardest task, since his jock's persona mutates from scene to scene. He is convincingly by turns acerbic, wounded, victim, victimizer, but always a tightly coiled threat.
Bill Hirschman can be reached at 954-356-4513 or bhirschman@sun-sentinel.com.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Theater Review: This Is How It Goes
By Hap Erstein, Palm Beach Post Theater Writer
The easiest way to get an audience to empathize with a character is to have him narrate the play. But as the rumpled former lawyer who has returned to his hometown with a devious agenda in Neil LaBute's cunning dark comedy, This Is How It Goes, concedes, he "might end up being an unreliable narrator."
Consider yourself warned, but do not let it stop you from heading to GableStage this month, where director Joseph Adler and a first-rate cast of three are offering a thought-provoking look at the nature of prejudice - specifically, but not exclusively, racial prejudice - in a nimble evening's game of whom-do-you-trust.
LaBute has made us uncomfortable in the theater and at the movies, showing us the unpleasant aspects of ourselves in such works as Bash, The Shape of Things, In the Company of Men and Fat Pig. This Is How It Goes is his latest entertaining indictment, in which we are asked to choose sides in an increasingly complex triangle.
There is the ex-lawyer, called simply Man (Todd Allen Durkin), who has never gotten over the high school crush he had on blond cheerleader Belinda (Beth McIntosh). Returning to that small Midwest town, he finds she is unhappily married to Cody (Brandon Morris), a former track star turned local business bigwig. Oh, and Cody is black.
Slowly and deliberately, we learn crucial facts about these characters, as Man introduces us to "how it went" for them, occasionally tossing in the thought that what we have just seen may or may not have happened that way, if at all. If you were taking notes, trying to decide which of the two men behaves most despicably, you would need a pencil with a good eraser.
For the moment, just accept that Man runs into Belinda outside of a shopping mall. She vaguely remembers him, but offers to rent him the apartment above her garage. From there, he observes Cody's belittling, abusive behavior to her and Man tries to help extricate her from the marriage, which conveniently serves his self-interests, too. That would be venal enough, but then you have to factor in racial hatred, which imbues the fabric of virtually all actions here.
"Words only have power if you let them," offers LaBute early on, somewhat disingenuously. For by the time we get to the final speech, a genially delivered outburst of such vitriol, you will feel its sting, no matter which side of the racial divide you are on.
There is a distinct likability to Durkin, who handles the comic, self-consciously theatrical, elements of the narration, then slips inside the play and persuades us to care about his character. In contrast, Morris exudes attitude and a coiled anger that is perpetually threatening to boil over. Note the way McIntosh cowers in his presence, with furtive glances of fear, and you will understand their dynamic. At least, as much as LaBute wants you to at the moment.
Adler knows how to keep the evening taut with tension, even within the moments of overt humor. Helping to keep the production moving, even as it hops between locales, is Lyle Baskin's painterly triptych set design.
All of LaBute's work seems to be variations on the same theme, man's inhumanity to man in today's world. You would think he would be approaching diminishing returns, but This Is How It Goes proves that there are still dark corners of the landscape for him to expose with his acid-dipped pen.
