Neil LaBute

Filthy Talk for Troubled Times

(Soft Skull)

Book Review by Adam McKibbin

Playwrights don’t come much more polarizing than Neil LaBute, whose latest work, The Break of Noon, will hit the stage later this year in a production starring David Duchovny (LA readers, it’s coming to the Geffen in February 2011).  Before he takes us there, he’s letting us take a trip through his formative years, going all the way back to 1989, when he made a noisy debut with Filthy Talk for Troubled Times.  In his preface to the book, which also includes some more recent one-acts and miscellany, LaBute refers to Filthy Talk as “the ground zero of what I’ve tried to accomplish throughout the course of my career (or at least during the period that anyone’s been paying attention).” 

It’s a career that hasn’t pulled many punches for the sake of sensitivity; OK, it hasn’t pulled any punches, and it even likes kicking mankind when mankind is down.  Writers capable of such cutting work, of course, often slice no one deeper than themselves, and one gets the sense that LaBute is one of those harsher-than-his-hardest-critics types (which is saying something in his case).  He also isn’t shy about acknowledging his lineage – and Filthy Talk wears its Mamet love proudly and plainly.  Set in a strip club, the play follows a nameless group of male patrons and topless female waitresses, fed up and frustrated at the frontlines of the gender war.  Strictly on its own merits, it’s the least interesting piece in the book that collection that bears its name.  But in terms of framing LaBute’s evolution as a playwright, it’s a fascinating read; some of the monologues crackle with unique brio, while entire stretches seem to have little fueling them beyond a young artist’s desire to shock (and, to be fair, there were probably a few theatergoers at BYU who would have said “mission accomplished”). 

While Filthy Talk is a canvas for a lot of general philosophizing about sex and life and the meaning of it all, the other works in the collection are more about a specific moment – about now.  Chekhov said that the day-to-day was the real challenge and that any idiot could handle a crisis, but LaBute isn’t convinced.  His work continually returns to crises, and the catalysts that give birth to these moments of turmoil.  He was even one of the first prominent playwrights to use 9/11 as a backdrop (The Mercy Seat, not included here).  Here, the woman in “Helter Skelter” (unnamed, typically) sums up this line of thinking – right before what is the most legitimately shocking moment in the collection:

“Medea and Joan of Arc and, and the girls who followed Charles Manson up a hill one fateful night… they were all just people at one time… like you and me and anyone else.  And then a thing happens, some thing happens inside them or to them, they wake up or get pushed off a ledge, a light turns off or on and snap!”

Few writers are as fearless as exploring the snap as Neil LaBute.