LaBute Neil LaBute: Plays 3

Bash; Reasons to Be Pretty; Reasons to Be Happy; If I Needed Someone; How to Fight Loneliness
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-39404-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

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 transfixing nastiness that has made LaBute one of the most disturbing theatrical presences of the last decade. Yet it also has an unexpected ingredient: a beating heart.' Observer Now collected with its sequel, which follows the same four loveable characters - Reasons to Be Happy 'A richly entertaining shard of tragicomedy . . . a snap survey of American masculinity in crisis.' Daily Telegraph If I Needed Someone A drunken first date becomes an acutely observed dance of desire, expectation and consent. 'For all of its misunderstandings, misperceptions, and bristles, for all the insecurities and past hurt it opens for both characters, If I Needed Someone is the kind of first date that people looking for love dream of having.' Broadway World How to Fight Loneliness A married couple call on a third man to help them make a desperate decision, in this compelling and unsettling drama. How to Fight Loneliness received its UK premiere at the Park Theatre, London, in April 2025. 'A play that will force you to consider your own sense of mortality . . . starkly devastating.' Spectrum

Neil LaBute received his Master of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University and was the recipient of a literary fellowship to study at the Royal Court Theatre, London. He also attended the Sundance Institute's Playwrights Lab and is the Playwright-in- Residence with MCC Theatre in New York City. LaBute's plays include: bash: latter-day plays, The Shape of Things, The Mercy Seat, The Distance From Here, Autobahn, Fat Pig (Olivier Award nominated for Best Comedy), Some Girl(s), This Is How It Goes, Wrecks, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times, In a Dark Dark House, Reasons to Be Pretty (Tony Award nominated for Best Play) and The Break of Noon. In the spring of 2011 his play In a Forest, Dark and Deep premiered in London's West End. LaBute is also the author of Seconds of Pleasure, a collection of short fiction which was published by Grove Atlantic. His films include In the Company of Men (New York Critics' Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmaker Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival), Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things, a film adaptation of his play of the same title, The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace and Death at a Funeral.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Labute, Neil

Leseproben

Iphigenia in Orem

Silence. Darkness.

Lights up slowly to reveal a young man, early thirties, dressed in a plain suit.

He is seated on the edge of a hotel chair and nurses a water glass in one hand.

Young Man … I’ll tell it once. One time because it deserves to be told, and then never again. Fair enough? Well, doesn’t really matter what you think. I mean, I care, I do, I want you to listen to this, hear me out, but it’s not really important how you feel about it all in the end … It’s happened now. And I don’t know you from Adam … or Eve, for that matter. (Laughs.) Sorry, I’m just trying to keep this … Yeah, anyway. Your drink OK? There’s plenty over on the counter there, so feel free … The looser the better on this one, I figure, so bottoms up, or whatever they say at the bar these days. I wouldn’t know. Really, feel free … Comes with the room. (Beat.) I’m not a drinker … You probably guessed that, though, right? Yeah … nothing but water here. (Holds up glass.) Never was, but when I saw you down in the lounge I could tell right away that you enjoyed the stuff. What is that you’ve got there? Some kind of red, what, wine, is it? Looks like it. Wine. Do, really, feel at home, all that’s just gonna go to waste if you don’t … Well, the next person’ll drink it maybe, but you know what I mean. Myself, I hate to waste things … (Beat.) So anyway, when I spotted you, alone like you were and going through that bottle, I figured you’d be a great listener. That you wouldn’t mind if I told you all this … and if I’m lucky, by tomorrow, you won’t even remember it. I’m kidding, but you’re OK, comfortable? Good. (Beat.) So … where should I … Let me see. Alright. I never used to travel. Pretty much stayed in our branch office, did things over the phone, handled it all that way. You know? Never cared much for driving all the time, meeting clients, that end of things … I mean, I did it when I first started, low man on the pole and whatever, but once I got the old MBA, foot in the door and all … I stuck to the desk as much as I could. I like it. That office … I don’t know … ‘feel’. The atmosphere. Faxes coming in, people zipping around, emergency strategy sessions, all that. It’s like being a kid again, playing at ‘war’ or that type of thing. I don’t mean exactly like that, but you know what I’m saying. It’s a whole different thing out there, I have to tell you. The world of business. It is. All that ‘dog eat dog’, ‘jungle out there’ stuff has become pretty cliché now, but it’s true. I mean, you can see what guys love about it. And I don’t mean just guys either, because there’s plenty of women in the field, too, obviously, but I mean ‘guys’ like in … well, ‘guys’. You know, how it’s used these days. All encompassing. It’s very high stakes, lots of cash floating around you, and the pressure’s a real … Well, just hot. Day in and out. Seriously. It is. We may play it like a game sometimes, but believe me, a day doesn’t go by in business that you’re not out for somebody’s blood …

Pause.

But, hey, you know what I’m talking about … you’re in what, sales? Yeah, I thought so. You look like … Well, no, I mean it in a complimentary … You just look like you could sell. Things. If you wanted to …

Pause.

I guess the point I’m making is that it’s a stress-filled situation I’m in, but I’m paid for it, not complaining, I just wanted to, I don’t know, lead in the right way on this. I’m not making excuses. I’m not … (Beat.) OK, so, once I got the degree, I went to the ‘Y’ for it, they’ve got a pretty decent program and it’s important, I think anyhow, to get your schooling from different places and since we lived in Salt Lake I’d gone to the ‘U’ for my undergraduate … ’Cause the whole BYU thing sounded a little intense for me when I was eighteen … Not that I was, I don’t know, like a rebel or anything, far from it, but I’d decided in high school not to go the mission route until after I had finished college. Maybe when I was married or something … I wanted to get right out there in the job market as quick as I could. Looks like I’m losing you. I’m LDS. You know, ‘Mormon’? Yeah. See, a ‘mission’ is where you go … Oh, OK, so you know what I’m talking about. Good. I figured you did, I mean, Las Vegas isn’t that far from … Must be getting late. I’ll try and be … brief – things took a bit of a turn for us last year. Well, I guess about a year and a half ago, now. My wife and me, the family, you know … we lost a child. Newborn. Well, five months old … Just like that. Just happened. (Beat.) I was off that day, a Friday, I think, and Deborah, that’s my wife, Deb, she was out – her mother was staying with us, and they were over at Safeway getting some milk – Deb put the baby down, ‘Emma’ we’d named her, she put Emma in our bed because that’s where she’d been sleeping the first few months … We always thought that was a good bonding thing, I’d read it somewhere, or she heard it at Relief Society or something like that … Anyway, so that’s what she did. She tucks her in, and out they went. And see, I was gonna lie down with her, I really was, but I just went back into the living room for a second, watch a little Wheel of Fortune or something, you know, five minutes a week to myself. And I fell. Fell off to sleep right there, there on the love-seat by the window. (Beat.) Deb’s mom … Emma’s grandma … found her. Maybe a half-hour later. She’d smothered herself under the covers, I don’t know, beneath the weight of the comforter or whatever it was. This big old maroon and gold thing we’d gotten as a wedding gift, huge – and she’d, well, she’d suffocated. That’s about as plain as you can tell it, right? The little thing … died in our bed, tangling herself in the blankets. (Beat.) The police had to come, they do for any kind of infant death, that’s what the officer said; I’d gotten a hold of myself by that time, still crying, but Deb … Deb was just kind of sitting there next to me, staring off, and this guy – this person – a detective, I suppose, was asking us questions. Standing there and firing off this series of questions. ‘Standard procedure’, he assured us, but still …

Pause.

What bothered him … No, ‘puzzled’ him, he said, never came right out and said it bothered him but you could see by the way he … He didn’t understand how the baby could get so far down. (Beat.) Now I am losing you, right? OK, yeah, I’m getting ahead of myself … It seemed to him that the baby, a baby that young and small, she was such a small little thing … was too far down toward the foot of the bed, and turned. Something about that seemed to be eating at him. I didn’t understand what he was getting at, the way he kept going back and forth over the events and times and all that, ‘Where were you standing?’ and ‘Approximately how long were you …?’ Blah, blah, blah. I mean, my gosh, we’re sitting there on the edge of the sofa, the bed my daughter has just died in I can see through an open door back down the hallway, and this man is pacing around, sucking on the chewed cap of a ballpoint pen and … asking me quietly, ‘Did you check on her?’ (Beat.) What’s he getting at, anyway? I mean, that’s a no-win, isn’t it? Think about it … If I didn’t check on her, I’m not a good father, not anything he can say about it, but I carry around the guilt, you know … Maybe I could’ve prevented it. Right? And if I did go in there, if I had’ve done what I was supposed to do, had planned on doing, the nap … then maybe she’d be alive. Maybe. (Beat.) And for just a second, just the briefest of moments … I catch Deb looking over at me. As if this is the first time the thought’s come to her as well. This possibility. The whole incident hangs there – probably only two or three seconds all together – but it just lays there in the air over us all. This shadow of a doubt … There’s another cliché for you … It hangs there until I say, very matter-of-factly, ‘Umm, no, I didn’t. I meant to, but …’ And off he goes. Says ‘fine’, stops me cold, and off he goes. Onto another tangent … (Beat.) She took my hand in hers, Deb did, just after that. Scooped it up into her tiny fingers and held it there … all the rest of that afternoon. Even after the police were gone, as we sat there into the evening with her mother, our two other children, home from school and having heard it all … None of us talking, just sitting and...