Neil LaBute: Stage and Cinema, and: Neil LaBute: A Casebook (review)

Over a decade since Neil LaBute received his first widespread exposure at the Sundance Film Festival and Off-Broadway, two recent works mark the first book-length contributions to LaBute criticism. Part of the Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre series, Christopher Bigsby’s well-researched inquiry seamlessly combines analyses of LaBute’s various texts – scripts, theatrical productions, and films – with interviews and prior LaBute criticism. Part of Routledge’s Casebooks on Modern Dramatists series, editor Gerald C. Wood’s collection of essays about LaBute’s work focuses on LaBute as theatrical innovator (his rhetorical theatre, attention to moral issues, and use of monologues) and theatrical instigator (alienating viewers and critics and subverting expectations). Both works elevate LaBute’s often-controversial oeuvre, ranking it favourably in the context of the American theatre and film landscape.

Living up to the book’s subtitle, “Stage and Cinema,” Bigsby explores LaBute’s work in theatre and film by moving chronologically through his career. Starting with bash: latterday plays and in the company of men, he traces LaBute’s work through to his more recent plays like Some Girl(s), Wrecks, and In a Dark Dark House, although less than a full chapter is dedicated to each of the later works. Within each chapter, Bigsby gives background on the play or film’s creation, details its plot and characters, summarizes its critical reception, and highlights LaBute’s main ideas. Although the book balances the dual aspects of LaBute’s career, Bigsby clearly sees LaBute as a man of the theatre first, and one who follows in the western theatrical tradition. A co-editor of The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Bigsby is encyclopaedic in his references: whether comparing A Distance from Here to Edward Bond’s Saved; in the company of men to David Mamet’s Glengarry, Glen Ross; or Your Friends and Neighbors to Restoration comedy, his comparisons highlight LaBute’s awareness of his own theatrical lineage. At different places, Bigsby also situates LaBute in context, referring, among others, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and O. Henry. And, when discussing LaBute’s film work, Bigsby bases his exploration on other theatrical practitioners working in film, connecting LaBute to Arthur Miller, Nicholas Hytner, Mamet, or Sam Shepard. LaBute, he claims, creates “a world as distinctive as Mamet’s or Shepard’s” (230), and the three playwrights correspond in their balancing of cinematic and theatrical careers, although LaBute began his career at a position that “it took Mamet several years to arrive” at (189).

Bigsby devotedly traces LaBute’s biographical history, starting with his birth in Michigan, upbringing in Washington state, and attendance at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah. A large part of the introduction explores the contrast between LaBute’s dark, caustic works and the protected environment at BYU, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (LaBute has since left the Church.) Bigsby traces the presence of Mormonism in bash: latterday plays and details the resistance to LaBute’s work at BYU and beyond. The most interesting biographical information comes in the final chapter, in which Bigsby interviews LaBute: for example, the reader learns of LaBute’s belief that his father was bipolar, the playwright’s explanation for his father’s physical abuse of the family while LaBute was growing up. According to LaBute, this abuse led to his being fairer to his female characters than to the men, “because the key male figure was one worth being suspicious of” (236). (Your Friends and Neighbors, in the company of men, Fat Pig, This Is How It Goes, and several other LaBute works corroborate this assertion, while the shape of things may be the exception.)

Calling LaBute a “moralist,” Bigsby sees LaBute’s works as “morality tales that in registering what...