A stage without light

Two plays probe the disturbing side of human nature

We live in a frightening, disturbing world. Terror, tragedy and twisted human beings fuel newscasts driven by the mantra, "If it bleeds, it leads." These days, it bleeds a lot.

Some playwrights react to our ongoing traumas by crafting escapist works that stressed-out theatergoers are only too happy to embrace. Why pay good money, they argue, to see something that's only going to bring them down?

Other playwrights see value in confronting and contemplating our darker impulses.

Two fascinating, disturbing plays by a pair of fearlessly provocative playwrights are about to open in South Florida. Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things previews Friday and opens Saturday at GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel; on Nov. 14, Adam Rapp's searing solo play, Nocturne, produced by a young company called The Modern Stage, opens at Performance Space 742 in Little Havana.

In Shape, a woman plays Pygmalion with a guy who happily yields to her sexual manipulation, as LaBute offers a disturbing answer to the question, "What is art?"

For Joseph Adler, GableStage's producing artistic director, doing plays like LaBute's is his raison d'tre. He wants to make audiences feel the way he did at the end of David Mamet's hotly debated Oleanna, when he could barely restrain himself from hurling a chair at the grad student who deliberately ruined her professor's life.

"More than any single thing, I want to affect an audience in a visceral way," Adler says. "I want them to go out talking."

After The Shape of Things, that's just what audiences do. When the play had its premiere at London's Almeida Theatre in May 2001, LaBute kept theatergoers from comparing notes before the play's startling ending by blasting Smashing Pumpkins music at such ear-splitting levels that he drove Harold Pinter, one of the playwrights to whom he's often compared, from the theater.

"I love the turn of a plot," LaBute says by phone from New York, where the writer-director of such disturbing films as In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors is directing Sigourney Weaver and Liev Schreiber in his new Off-Broadway play, The Mercy Seat." I know where I'm going but not how I'm going to get there. It makes it more interesting and surprising to write and to watch."

Of the darkness he embraces in movies and plays like bash -- an Off-Broadway trilogy about violence and Mormons that got him "disfellowshipped" (the last step before excommunication) from the Mormon Church -- LaBute says, "We're attracted to things outside our normal experience. To taboos. We're a fairly voyeuristic society. We find villains attractive and most interesting. People are unnerved when I let villains go, and they don't get their due."

The villain in The Shape of Things is Evelyn, an adroitly manipulative art grad student at a liberal arts college in a conservative Midwestern town. As Adler sees it, Evelyn is the flip side of the misogynists of In the Company of Men; LaBute is, he says, "an equal opportunity offender who has no interest in political correctness."

Claire Tyler, the actress playing Evelyn at GableStage, remembers when she first read the play. Her reaction speaks to why and how edgy plays like LaBute's appeal to the younger audience theaters are so desperate to attract.

"I was shocked to the bone,"' she says. 'Something inside me changed. I'd been happy, in a good mood, and that all ended. LaBute is fantastically appealing to a generation questioning itself and all the systems that are in place. We believe it's f---ed up, and wonder how we fit into it. This makes you ask, 'What are my moral issues?'"

Terrell Hardcastle, the actor playing Adam to Tyler's conniving Eve, is one of those who sees LaBute as a next-generation Pinter.

"The spareness, the purity and distilled quality of the dialogue remind me of Pinter," he says. "The lines are small but so potent. . . . The ending is just devastating. . . . The 'nowness' of the play is impressive. And as an actor, the deeper the strata, the more you discover. You read it, you reread it. You pull back the layers."

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.