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Neil LaBute
Neil LaBute: A Casebook is the first book to examine one of the most successful and controversial contemporary American playwrights and filmmakers. While he is most famous, and in some cases infamous, for his early films In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, Labute is equally accomplished as a playwright. His work extends from the critique of false religiosity in Bash to examinations of opportunism, irresponsible art, failed parenting, and racism in later plays like Mercy Seat, The Shape of Things, The Distance From Here, Fat Pig, Autobahn, and the very recent This Is How It Goes and Some Girls. Like David Mamet, an acknowledged influence on him, and Conor McPhereson, with wh...
Neil Labute: Plays 3
Bash Three darkly brilliant one-act plays, unblinking portraits of the evils abroad in everyday life, first performed in 1999. 'You don't need to be familiar with Greek tragedy to admire LaBute's ability to illuminate the dark corners of the human mind . . . He writes with unblinking candour, unvarying incisiveness and the ear and eye for the tiny, telling fact that reveals a character floundering on the edge.' The Times Reasons to Be Pretty Nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, Reasons to Be Pretty explores love, language and power with fresh wit and insight. 'Neil LaBute at his best. It says things about love and betrayal that are rarely put on stage . . . The play has the transfixin...
Neil LaBute: Plays 2
'LaBute takes us to shadowy places we don't like to talk about, sometimes even to think about.' Newsday Obsession with surface and secrets runs through this second collection of Neil LaBute's work. The Shape of Things peels back the skin of modern-day relationships to ask how far someone might change themselves for love, or for art. In Fat Pig, a man confronts his friends' - and his own - fixation with Hollywood ideals of beauty when he falls for a 'plus size' young woman. In a Dark Dark House and In a Forest, Dark and Deep are twin tales of sibling conflict. In the first, estranged brothers must reconcile conflicting memories, after one asks for corroboration of childhood abuse. In the seco...
The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights
Unrivalled in its coverage of recent work and writers, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights surveys and analyses the breadth, vitality and development of theatrical work to emerge from America over the last fifty years. This authoritative guide leads you through the work of 25 major contemporary American playwrights, discussing more than 140 plays in detail. Written by a team of 25 eminent international scholars, each chapter provides: · a biographical introduction to the playwright's work; · a survey and concise analysis of the writer's most important plays; · a discussion of their style, dramaturgical concerns and critical reception; · a bibliography of published plays and a select list of critical works. Among the many Tony, Obie and Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights included are Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Paula Vogel and Neil LaBute. The abundance of work analysed enables fresh, illuminating conclusions to be drawn about the development of contemporary American playwriting.
Neil LaBute: Plays 1
Filthy Talk for Troubled Time is one of LaBute's earliest plays. A downbeat night at a topless bar exposes the gulf between the twitchy clientele and the waitresses who serve but despise them. The Mercy Seat examines a couple who, on the day after a world-changing atrocity, toy with exploiting it to start a new life. Some Girl(s) follows a young writer's panicked retreat from his imminent wedding as he seeks out old girlfriends and opens new wounds, while in This Is How It Goes the breakdown of a seemingly successful marriage is complicated by submerged bigotry. The collection also includes two short plays about relationships in crisis - A Second of Pleasure and Helter Skelter - which are in equal part tender and chilling. Together these plays form a complex and compelling portrait of the sexes - sometimes warring, sometimes loving, but never fully at peace.
Pimps, Wimps, Studs, Thugs and Gentlemen
With essays ranging in topic from the films of Neil LaBute to the sexual politics of Major League Baseball, this diverse collection of essays examines the multi-faceted media images of contemporary masculinity from a variety of perspectives and academic disciplines. The book's first half focuses on the issue of racialized masculinity and its various manifestations, with essays covering, among other topics, the re-imagining of Asian American masculinity in Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow and the ever-present image of black male buffoonery in the neo-minstrel performances of VH1's Flavor of Love. The book's second half explores the issue of contemporary mediated performance and the cultural politics of masculinity, with essays focusing on popular media representations of men in a variety of gendered roles, from homemakers and househusbands to valorous war heroes and athletic demigods.
Filthy Talk for Troubled Times
A collection of early work and new short pieces from “the bad boy of American theater” (Time). Neil LaBute burst onto the American theater scene in 1989 with his controversial debut Filthy Talk for Troubled Times. Set in a barroom in Anytown, USA, and populated by a series of everymen (and two beleaguered everywomen), this series of frank exchanges explores the innumerable varieties of American intolerance. A unique snapshot of the times, the play—seldom allowed production by the author since—provides a compelling look at the early thinking and evolution of one of our great theater artists. Also in this collection is a series of new, short works, some never before produced. They incl...
Neil LaBute: Plays 3
Bash Three darkly brilliant one-act plays, unblinking portraits of the evils abroad in everyday life, first performed in 1999. 'You don't need to be familiar with Greek tragedy to admire LaBute's ability to illuminate the dark corners of the human mind . . . He writes with unblinking candour, unvarying incisiveness and the ear and eye for the tiny, telling fact that reveals a character floundering on the edge.' The Times Reasons to Be Pretty Nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, Reasons to Be Pretty explores love, language and power with fresh wit and insight. 'Neil LaBute at his best. It says things about love and betrayal that are rarely put on stage . . . The play has the transfixin...
The Shape of Things
In a modern version of Adam's seduction by Eve, this play pits gentle, awkward, overweight Adam against experienced, analytical, amoral Evelyn, a graduate student in art.
Shorter, Faster, Funnier
This cornucopia of comedy showcases works by major playwrights and emerging young writers, with casts of all sizes and diverse and challenging roles for actors of every age and type. You’ll discover such colorful characters as a businessman free-falling from a plane, an embittered sword swallower, a punkish girl skateboarder, and retirees in post-apocalyptic Siberia, alongside plays that unleash the humor in high school reunions, alien invasions, office cubicle farms, and even post-Katrina New Orleans. Perfect for actors, students, theater lovers, and comedy fans, Shorter, Faster, Funnier covers the spectrum of humor, from slyly witty to over-the-top outrageous. Rob Ackerman ● Billy Aron...
