First, turnabout is fair play: Neil LaBute responds (in part) to my post “Work Made for Hire” at the Guardian theatre blog, where Andrew Haydon included it in his weekly “Noises Off” roundup yesterday. That Mr. LaBute also reveals that there were “certain limitations in language and topics,” though, only reinforces my point about the Los Angeles Times — especially that topic restrictions bit. While one doesn’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill, I’ll only point out that philosopher Theodor Adorno also believed that even seemingly harmless newspaper features like the astrology column (and, ironically, Adorno was writing specifically about the astrology column published in the Los Angeles Times) said a great deal about the culture in which they’re disseminated. Not that I was trying to be Adorno, either.
With that out of the way, today’s Friday video: A few years ago Michael Riedel and Susan Haskins sat down for a rare television interview with Arthur and Barbara Gelb, authors of the first major biography of Eugene O’Neill, in which they discussed the origins of the biography and a host of other issues relating to the playwright. It first aired as part of CUNY’s Theatre Talk series on 10 March 2006.
UPDATE: More on this on my 23 September post here.
Neil LaBute (Photo: Michel Spingler / Associated Press) and Theresa Rebeck (Photo: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
None dare call it a publicity stunt, but according to the Los Angeles Times, playwrights Neil LaBute and Theresa Rebeck collaborated on a play yesterday, in real time, for the Times‘ “Culture Monster” blog. Neither playwright is a stranger to either Broadway or large regional non-profit theatres (if there are any American playwrights who can be said to be “household names” in the way that Stephen King and Martin Scorsese are, these two would be among them), and I suspect that this challenge is meant to coincide with the Los Angeles opening of Ms. Rebeck’s Poor Behavior at the Mark Taper Forum later this month and her play Seminar, which opens on Broadway in November, as well as the upcoming London opening of Mr. LaBute’s reasons to be pretty. Mr. LaBute has no upcoming LA openings of his own plays, so perhaps he was just being a good sport.
Only a churl would suggest that you’d never find Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller doing such a thing at the height of their careers — the public relations game has changed a great deal in the past 50 years, as well as the difficulty of filling a theatre for a new straight play, and maybe today they would. But it is indicative, in a small way, of how much the given limitations of the challenge define theatre and drama in America in the early years of the 21st century to the general public. Mr. LaBute and Ms. Rebeck did not actually come up with an idea for the play itself; instead, like an audience yelling suggestions out to an improvisational comedy group or one of those collaborative “24-hour-play” projects, the Times‘ readers were invited to vote for one of six stories which the playwrights would then flesh out. It’s the assumptions underlying the choice that make for interesting contemplation. The options were, and I quote from the Los Angeles Timesblog entry:
Ann, the CEO of a large corporation, is interviewing Steve for a job, not realizing they had a one-night stand a few years ago. Will he let her know?
Former childhood sweethearts Jenn and Joe, now married to others, reunite at their 20th high school reunion.
Ted and Sue meet on the Internet but now they’re taking things to the next level — meeting in person for a “real” date.
Surprise! Recently divorced Sandy and Ken are seated together on a six-hour flight across the country.
Robin and Rick fall in love, then discover they’re both the product of a sperm donor — possibly the same one.
Kristin enrolls in a figure studies class, then realizes that she knows the nude model, Ron, from church.
All of these “stories” (more like anecdotes) have a tone reminiscent of the more forgettable sketches from the Saturday Night Live of the late 1970s (or The Carol Burnett Show of the early 1970s, with a contemporary twist). More to the point, the six options all suggest an extraordinarily narrow range not only of form (realism) but of content as well. They are all dialogues for two; none of them seem to have any connection with larger social issues (the first option glances fleetingly at it — the employment crisis — only to sublimate it under a romantic-comedy guise); the figures all seem to be among the middle- or upper-middle-classes; and they are all likely to produce a rather wan, character-driven comedy.
Making anything of this may be making too much of it. But it does suggest what the Los Angeles Times means by “a play,” and the contemporary topics to which American dramatists should be addressing their talents. The shame of it is that this public challenge to two recognized American playwrights could have been far more interesting. Instead of one-sentence comedy sketch descriptions, the Times could have asked the readership to vote on a Biblical story for the two to dramatize (a much smaller and less ambitious project than the upcomingSixty-Six Books project of the Bush Theatre in London, but just as intriguing for all that); a contemporary social, cultural, or political issue (of which there are legion — the rise of the Tea Party movement, the fiscal crisis, the Obama administration’s plummeting approval ratings); even a formal challenge (a wordless play, a play written in rhyming verse, a location for a site-specific play). The Times could have taken the opportunity to encourage these two writers, in a rare public working collaboration, to spread their wings — not to clip them.
The shame of it is also that perhaps the Times is right: that their readership considers these narrow avenues of style and content to be what American theatre and drama should consist of. As I mentioned earlier, this is small potatoes indeed. But it is indicative of the status and definition of the American drama by the lights of the Times and, obliquely, to these two writers. Both have done better than this, and they’ll do so again. Still, something to stick in the craw.
Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since. We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that “our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.” …
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
I would also direct your attention to Erik Ehn’s post “here and here” today at the Soulographie project blog.
Earlier this year I embarked for a very short while on a project which proposed to trace the experience of the WTC bombings through American drama of the last ten years; it did not pan out for a number of reasons (though I still consider it an endeavor worthy of consideration). Among the plays I discussed was Neil Labute’s 2010 drama The Break of Noon. I believe that my conclusions about the play are still quite relevant, and this essay is reposted below with minor revisions to the final paragraph, having originally been published on 1 March 2011.
David Duchovny and Tracee Chimo in the MCC production of The Break of Noon. Photo: Sara Krulwich, New York Times
The Break of Noon by Neil LaBute. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010. World premiere (directed by Jo Bonney): Manhattan Class Company (MCC), New York, 28 October 2010. Text available from amazon.com here.
You’re still a guy. And guys always wanna hide shit. Right? … And not any amount of God’s light in this world is gonna change that fact. (79)
The origin of the United States as a cultural and national entity has a unique basis in faith and religion; John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon A Model of Christian Charity described the new American settlement at the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “Shining City upon a hill,” that the settlers had been chosen by God as an example to the rest of the world, quoting Jesus Christ in Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Neil LaBute’s The Break of Noon investigates the mystery of grace, its arbitrary nature and its ability (or inability) to change the behavior of those who believe they have been the recipients of spiritual redemption. LaBute draws the plot of the play from the headlines: from the American school and office massacres that have occurred with considerable regularity over the past decade since 9/11, the 2011 Tucson shooting being only the most recent example. While LaBute’s lead character, the everyman John (or Jonathan) Smith, may or may not have had grace bestowed on him in the moments following a mass office shooting, LaBute’s play about private individuals also resonates with cultural and political significance, like those of Howard Brenton to whom the play is dedicated (along with Blaise Pascal). Far from treating Smith as a mere lucky victim, LaBute also acknowledges Smith’s own culpability and guilt for the violence which left him relatively unscathed, as well as the egocentrism and narcissism that accompanies his conversion experience. These also inform LaBute’s early play The Mercy Seat, written in the days immediately after 9/11, and cast light upon the American stage’s continuing examination and absorption of the experience of urban Americans in the years following the World Trade Center disaster.
The play itself takes the form of a spiritual journey — a “stations of the cross” for the sole survivor of an office shooting (which notably takes place in the month of September, though no direct mention is made of 9/11), who believes not only that he was saved by God, but that he was “chosen” to deliver a message to the world, “like Saul on the road to Damascus” (37), revealing this message to a skeptical talkshow host:
JOHN: He told me … God said to me that I should try to … that I needed to be good. / That we should try and be good. To each other.
HOST: … excuse me? / “Good”?
JOHN: Yes. You know, like … kind.
HOST: That’s it? That you should be … what?
JOHN: No, that we all did. We all need to be …
HOST: We should be, what, good people? …
JOHN: Yes. / Or better. Better than we are. That is what he was telling me … (51)
John has also managed to take a cellphone picture of the killer — one of John’s underlings named Juan Diaz — in the moments before he turned the gun to his own head to kill himself; in the first of his stations, a visit to a lawyer, he is rather easily convinced to sell the photograph to the media for a considerable sum of money. This exploitation of his own position for financial gain (through the rest of the play Smith vaguely says that he has given “most” of the money to charity, though he doesn’t reveal how much he’s retained) is only the first of several instances that call into question the efficacy of this conversion. A picnic with his ex-wife, with whom he hopes to reconcile, ends in recrimination and insult; he is unable to contain his hostility to a blithely cynical talk-show host; he visits a dominatrix (in fact the daughter of one of the victims) in an attempt to see whether the conversion has had an effect on his sexuality; a meeting with a former mistress (the cousin of his ex-wife) ends in physical violence; a session at a police station reveals Smith’s continuing belief that he has been at least marginally responsible for some of the deaths of his fellow co-workers through his reluctance to help the victims and his overriding interest in taking the cellphone picture — for reasons he himself cannot explain.
At the same time as he experiences this newfound grace, he also seems to experience a particular brand of survivors’ guilt: a guilt which he may well deserve, for the final scene of the play, a direct address to the audience, reveals that Smith and his colleagues profoundly abused the gunman — “A friend of mine … a salesman who was shot that day — he did this, like, massive poop in his desk one time. Over lunch. I mean, he did it out in the bathroom but carried it in on a paper towel and laid it in the lower drawer [of Diaz' desk]” — in the days before Smith blithely handed him his termination letter: “I did it, I mean, put [the termination letter] in his hands — as the Operations Manager, that was my job. I gave him a little smile and a wink, even … I handed it to him and off I trotted, back over to my friends and laughing.” (98-99) Smith’s professional and personal abuse of this cultural outsider, this “other” who “barely spoke English” and with whom he can feel no empathy, has its clear result in this outburst of violence. When Diaz finally confronts him on the day of the shooting, Smith confesses, it’s mere bad luck (on Diaz’s part) that keeps Smith alive:
He put this huge … gun … its barrel … into my mouth and he pulled the trigger. And nothing. And again. Nothing. Click. Click. Click. Without looking away he discharged the clip and slammed in another. … I had to put it back into my throat and then he did it again. Pulled the trigger … click. Oh Christ, I was … I dunno, this couldn’t be happening! … He looks at me and do you know what he did? He turned the gun on himself. He shrugged like, you know, like I’d asked him a science question that he couldn’t figure out — he shrugged and put the gun in his own mouth. Pulled the trigger once and it roared. BAM! This spray of blood went, oh-my-God, it was … everywhere … and he dropped to the ground. At my feet. (99-100)
In the days after 9/11, I can anecdotally report that many New Yorkers seemed to experience a kind of survivors’ guilt as well, the “there but for the grace of God” haunted self-justification for the continuation of everyday life that inevitably occurred, in the wake of the disaster; perhaps this extended to many other Americans. When commingled with pride in their own community, this sense of good luck can rapidly expand to a form of determinism: an internal manifest destiny. If LaBute’s play examines the disconnect between ambition and ability on the individual level, this disconnect might be extended to a national and communal context as well.
As the name of the protagonist and the structure of the play imply, The Break of Noon is, finally, an allegory wrapped within the genre of English-language dramatic realism, and as such what occurs on the stage can be trusted about as much as John Smith. At the end of the play, as he speaks to the audience, Smith levitates — “And for a moment it’s true — John Smith rises slowly off the ground,” the stage directions have it (102). But if Smith is a self-deceiver, the spectator must ask whether or not this is operating as a realistic gesture or a (mere?) metaphor for grace. In a sense, it’s unimportant whether or not Smith the character truly levitates, whether he is truly blessed or chosen; what is significant here is that he thinks he is. As his behavior through the play has indicated, Smith is no match for Jesus Christ. But the egocentrism and selfishness which American culture inculcates into its citizens permits them to believe that they have a special, chosen role to play in global culture, a new post-capitalist, post-9/11 manifest destiny: the victim, in the days following the World Trade Center or the supermarket or office shooting, is turned into a hero. Whether or not the imperfect, even cruel and guilty, individual is a reliable vehicle for this idealized heroism is a question that LaBute refuses to answer.
In terms of dramatic language and like many of his contemporaries, LaBute’s dialogue builds upon the work of his predecessors Harold Pinter and David Mamet. British playwright Terry Johnson once noted of these two playwrights that, “Good dialogue has a rhythm. If Pinter works at a strict four beats to the bar … Mamet instinctively pushed it to a more contemporary sixteen beats.” [1] Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, LaBute extends it into a more fragmented linguistic structure: instead of the four-four time of Pinter and even Mamet, LaBute’s dialogue is continually overlapping in linguistic polyrhythms (as the slashes in the above dialogue between Smith and the talk show host suggest) — a five-sixteenths time signature, to extend the musical comparison somewhat, not unlike that of LaBute’s near-exact British contemporary Martin Crimp.
Crimp, like the other British dramatists that Neil LaBute admires (he discussed them in this 2008 article for the Guardian, to which I responded shortly thereafter, participating in a good-natured tussle with LaBute), is more formally experimental. But like Christopher Shinn, LaBute is mining the possibilities that remain in the genre of American realism. In so doing — and by confronting head-on the so-called “big issues” of religion, culture, politics and sexuality — LaBute demonstrates that theatre and drama are more than equal to the challenges that American life in a world of fear can offer. Of course, American dramatists have been meeting these challenges with wildly varying degrees of success, and the issues that LaBute raised in his Guardian article may be even more resonant now, a few years later.
Although LaBute, with The Mercy Seat, was among the first American dramatists to respond to the changed status of American culture in the aftermath of 9/11, he was not the first. That distinction most likely goes to Anne Nelson and her play The Guys — a play about memorialization and heroism written immediately after the event. Appropriately, too, Nelson’s title suggests a realignment of ideas about American masculinity, ideas which LaBute would also contemplate with several plays written from 2001-2011.
Below is a brief interview with Neil LaBute speaking about the play in regard to the current Los Angeles Geffen Playhouse production, running through 6 March:
David Duchovny and Tracee Chimo in the MCC production of The Break of Noon. Photo: Sara Krulwich, New York Times
The Break of Noon by Neil LaBute. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010. World premiere (directed by Jo Bonney): Manhattan Class Company (MCC), New York, 28 October 2010. Text available from amazon.com here.
You’re still a guy. And guys always wanna hide shit. Right? … And not any amount of God’s light in this world is gonna change that fact. (79)
The origin of the United States as a cultural and national entity has a unique basis in faith and religion; John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon A Model of Christian Charity described the new American settlement at the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “Shining City upon a hill,” that the settlers had been chosen by God as an example to the rest of the world, quoting Jesus Christ in Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Neil LaBute’s The Break of Noon investigates the mystery of grace, its arbitrary nature and its ability (or inability) to change the behavior of those who believe they have been the recipients of spiritual redemption. LaBute draws the plot of the play from the headlines: from the American school and office massacres that have occurred with considerable regularity over the past decade since 9/11, the 2011 Tucson shooting being only the most recent example. While LaBute’s lead character, the everyman John (or Jonathan) Smith, may or may not have had grace bestowed on him in the moments following a mass office shooting, LaBute’s play about private individuals also resonates with cultural and political significance, like those of Howard Brenton to whom the play is dedicated (along with Blaise Pascal). Far from treating Smith as a mere lucky victim, LaBute also acknowledges Smith’s own culpability and guilt for the violence which left him relatively unscathed, as well as the egocentrism and narcissism that accompanies his conversion experience. These also inform LaBute’s early play The Mercy Seat, written in the days immediately after 9/11, and cast light upon the American stage’s continuing examination and absorption of the experience of urban Americans in the years following the World Trade Center disaster.
The play itself takes the form of a spiritual journey — a “stations of the cross” for the sole survivor of an office shooting (which notably takes place in the month of September, though no direct mention is made of 9/11), who believes not only that he was saved by God, but that he was “chosen” to deliver a message to the world, “like Saul on the road to Damascus” (37), revealing this message to a skeptical talkshow host:
JOHN: He told me … God said to me that I should try to … that I needed to be good. / That we should try and be good. To each other.
HOST: … excuse me? / “Good”?
JOHN: Yes. You know, like … kind.
HOST: That’s it? That you should be … what?
JOHN: No, that we all did. We all need to be …
HOST: We should be, what, good people? …
JOHN: Yes. / Or better. Better than we are. That is what he was telling me … (51)
John has also managed to take a cellphone picture of the killer — one of John’s underlings named Juan Diaz — in the moments before he turned the gun to his own head to kill himself; in the first of his stations, a visit to a lawyer, he is rather easily convinced to sell the photograph to the media for a considerable sum of money. This exploitation of his own position for financial gain (through the rest of the play Smith vaguely says that he has given “most” of the money to charity, though he doesn’t reveal how much he’s retained) is only the first of several instances that call into question the efficacy of this conversion. A picnic with his ex-wife, with whom he hopes to reconcile, ends in recrimination and insult; he is unable to contain his hostility to a blithely cynical talk-show host; he visits a dominatrix (in fact the daughter of one of the victims) in an attempt to see whether the conversion has had an effect on his sexuality; a meeting with a former mistress (the cousin of his ex-wife) ends in physical violence; a session at a police station reveals Smith’s continuing belief that he has been at least marginally responsible for some of the deaths of his fellow co-workers through his reluctance to help the victims and his overriding interest in taking the cellphone picture — for reasons he himself cannot explain.
At the same time as he experiences this newfound grace, he also seems to experience a particular brand of survivors’ guilt: a guilt which he may well deserve, for the final scene of the play, a direct address to the audience, reveals that Smith and his colleagues profoundly abused the gunman — “A friend of mine … a salesman who was shot that day — he did this, like, massive poop in his desk one time. Over lunch. I mean, he did it out in the bathroom but carried it in on a paper towel and laid it in the lower drawer [of Diaz' desk]” — in the days before Smith blithely handed him his termination letter: “I did it, I mean, put [the termination letter] in his hands — as the Operations Manager, that was my job. I gave him a little smile and a wink, even … I handed it to him and off I trotted, back over to my friends and laughing.” (98-99) Smith’s professional and personal abuse of this cultural outsider, this “other” who “barely spoke English” and with whom he can feel no empathy, has its clear result in this outburst of violence. When Diaz finally confronts him on the day of the shooting, Smith confesses, it’s mere bad luck (on Diaz’s part) that keeps Smith alive:
He put this huge … gun … its barrel … into my mouth and he pulled the trigger. And nothing. And again. Nothing. Click. Click. Click. Without looking away he discharged the clip and slammed in another. … I had to put it back into my throat and then he did it again. Pulled the trigger … click. Oh Christ, I was … I dunno, this couldn’t be happening! … He looks at me and do you know what he did? He turned the gun on himself. He shrugged like, you know, like I’d asked him a science question that he couldn’t figure out — he shrugged and put the gun in his own mouth. Pulled the trigger once and it roared. BAM! This spray of blood went, oh-my-God, it was … everywhere … and he dropped to the ground. At my feet. (99-100)
In the days after 9/11, I can anecdotally report that many New Yorkers seemed to experience a kind of survivors’ guilt as well, the “there but for the grace of God” haunted self-justification for the continuation of everyday life that inevitably occurred, in the wake of the disaster; perhaps this extended to many other Americans. When commingled with pride in their own community, this sense of good luck can rapidly expand to a form of determinism: an internal manifest destiny. If LaBute’s play examines the disconnect between ambition and ability on the individual level, this disconnect might be extended to a national and communal context as well.
As the name of the protagonist and the structure of the play imply, The Break of Noon is, finally, an allegory wrapped within the genre of English-language dramatic realism, and as such what occurs on the stage can be trusted about as much as John Smith. At the end of the play, as he speaks to the audience, Smith levitates — “And for a moment it’s true — John Smith rises slowly off the ground,” the stage directions have it (102). But if Smith is a self-deceiver, the spectator must ask whether or not this is operating as a realistic gesture or a (mere?) metaphor for grace. In a sense, it’s unimportant whether or not Smith the character truly levitates, whether he is truly blessed or chosen; what is significant here is that he thinks he is. As his behavior through the play has indicated, Smith is no match for Jesus Christ. But the egocentrism and selfishness which American culture inculcates into its citizens permits them to believe that they have a special, chosen role to play in global culture, a new post-capitalist, post-9/11 manifest destiny: the victim, in the days following the World Trade Center or the supermarket or office shooting, is turned into a hero. Whether or not the imperfect, even cruel and guilty, individual is a reliable vehicle for this idealized heroism is a question that LaBute refuses to answer.
In terms of dramatic language and like many of his contemporaries, LaBute’s dialogue builds upon the work of his predecessors Harold Pinter and David Mamet. British playwright Terry Johnson once noted of these two playwrights that, “Good dialogue has a rhythm. If Pinter works at a strict four beats to the bar … Mamet instinctively pushed it to a more contemporary sixteen beats.” [1] Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, LaBute extends it into a more fragmented linguistic structure: instead of the four-four time of Pinter and even Mamet, LaBute’s dialogue is continually overlapping in linguistic polyrhythms (as the slashes in the above dialogue between Smith and the talk show host suggest) — a five-sixteenths time signature, to extend the musical comparison somewhat, not unlike that of LaBute’s near-exact British contemporary Martin Crimp.
Crimp, like the other British dramatists that Neil LaBute admires (he discussed them in this 2008 article for the Guardian, to which I responded shortly thereafter, participating in a good-natured tussle with LaBute), is more formally experimental. But like Christopher Shinn, LaBute is mining the possibilities that remain in the genre of American realism. In so doing — and by confronting head-on the so-called “big issues” of religion, culture, politics and sexuality — LaBute demonstrates that theatre and drama are more than equal to the challenges that American life in a world of fear can offer. Of course, American dramatists have been meeting these challenges with wildly varying degrees of success, and the issues that LaBute raised in his Guardian article may be even more resonant now, a few years later.
Although LaBute, with The Mercy Seat, was among the first American dramatists to respond to the changed status of American culture in the aftermath of 9/11, he was not the first. That distinction most likely goes to Anne Nelson and her play The Guys — a play about memorialization and heroism written immediately after the event, and which I will discuss in the next entry in this series, before looking more generally at LaBute’s career in the last decade. Appropriately, too, Nelson’s title suggests a realignment of ideas about American masculinity, ideas which LaBute would also contemplate with several plays written from 2001-2011.
Below is a brief interview with Neil LaBute speaking about the play in regard to the current Los Angeles Geffen Playhouse production, running through 6 March:
