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Neil LaBute, on his play The Break of Noon

Trying to Redeem the Human Mess

By Steven Leigh Morris

The meister of messy and cruel romantic relationships, in works such as In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things, Fat Pig and Reasons to Be Pretty, playwright, screenwriter and film director Neil LaBute shines a spotlight on atrocious behavior. For this, he’s often described as a misanthrope, i.e. that being the literary stepchild of David Mamet, LaBute writes from the assumption that human advancement stems from a toxic brew of amorality and immorality.

That is, of course a judgment, and LaBute insists he tries not to judge, but rather to examine the darkest recesses of his central characters – an aim consistent with ancient Greek scribes. Is Sophocles a misanthrope because Oedipus the King murders his dad and marries his own mother? Is Aeschylus a misanthrope because Clytemnestra murders her husband in cold blood? Is Euripides a misanthrope because Clytemnestra’s son and daughter, Orestes and Electra, murder their mother in the same pool of frigid blood?

In these plays, and in LaBute’s, nobody really wins, because the game itself is so toxic. The only victor is the fellow who finds a different playing field.

The reception to LaBute’s plays has often been mixed while he’s maintained a solid cadre of fans. His 2010 play, The Break of Noon, however, is one of the few of his works to be almost universally panned by critics; it premiered at MCC Theater in New York, and that production, directed by Jo Bonney, transferred to the Geffen Playhouse in L.A.

George Villas in the City Garage production of The Break of Noon (Photo by Paul M. Rubenstein)

At its core, the play bears a striking resemblance to Moliere’s Tartuffe, which is perhaps what captured the imagination of French director Frederique Michel, who has re-staged the production at Santa Monica’s City Garage. (It plays at the troupe’s Bergamot Station theater through May 24.)

In a sequence of mostly two-character scenes, the play focuses on a protagonist named John Smith, who is the lone survivor of an office shooting and, as such, becomes convinced that God intervened on his behalf, and that his purpose in life is to spread the holy word of his personal savior. John Smith is not exalted in any way. He is, in fact, a mediocrity and an adulterer, who, in the midst of the carnage, found the presence of mind to take a cellphone picture of the shooter (instead of actually helping any of the wounded all around him), and exploit that snapshot for financial gain, and fame, and the furtherance of his newfound religious calling. Nobody believes in his calling except himself – not his wife, his mistress or the police. He is, in short, an unsympathetic protagonist who stumbles onto a meaning-of-life derived largely from his own hypocrisy and turpitude. If it were more jokey, and John Smith were obviously a con-man, this play might be as popular as Tartuffe. Instead, by design, in what LaBute has called one of his most introspective plays, John Smith, an otherwise unremarkable man,  believes in his salvation and takes it just as seriously as his responsibility to credit The Man Upstairs for it. This is probably why the play is so unpopular.
 

Gerard Depardieu as Tartuffe

 If you watch Gerard Depardieu’s almost moribund, earnest Tartuffe, you’ll get a sense of where Bonney’s staging may have gone awry – a knotty, introspective potential that disappeared in the flash and pace of Bonney’s staging.

Michel is famously inured to being overly worried about whether her productions are popular (a predilection she shares with the author), and her production is both more lugubrious, more grandiose and more terrifying than Bonney’s. Like Depardieu’s Tartuffe, it follows not a villain but a man genuinely amazed by his destiny. His conversion is not a con – the stock-in-trade  Tartuffe model. Rather, it’s the earnest struggle of a shallow man and, by extension, a merciless assessment of religion in the hands of simpletons.

Detroit-born LaBute is the son of a hospital receptionist and a long-haul truck driver. After growing up in Spokane, Washington, he studied theater at Brigham Young University, where he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He spoke with Stage Raw before heading off to London to speak with producers about a new project there. This interview took place about a week before the City Garage production opened.

Villas and Kristina Drager (Paul M. Rubenstein)

STAGE RAW:  The Break of Noon is so different from most of your plays. Where did it come from?

NEIL LABUTE I had grown up around faith and faith-based questions most of my life. I went to a non-denominational church when I was a kid, then I went to an undergraduate private school [Brigham Young University]. I think questions of morality and faith and all of those intangibles that we deal with are interesting.

It struck me as an idea of someone who survived a catastrophic moment like an office shooting. I didn’t want to do something, where what he was saying wasn’t true, at least not in his eyes That doesn’t mean [God’s intervention] is what happened, but that’s what he thought happened, that he was saved, and set aside. He took a picture and thought it would be useful for his word that God wanted him to get out.

I find that fundamentally, and it’s not just an American preoccupation, but faith becomes such a big part of people’s lives, but they’re really wanting something tangible, yet faith is based on thin-air.

 So I wanted it to be something like a Mystery play, following an Everyman, moving towards clarity or self-revelation. So taking something like a Mystery play and putting it in the context of something as American as mass shootings, that was interesting to me.

SR: You wanted him to be earnest?

NL: He doesn’t even understand why he’s been singled out. Why would it be me. There were far better people, more faithful people, more religious. He ultimately feels it’s not his place to question. Everybody else questions, of course – his wife, his mistress, the police.

SR: Did you set out to write a religious play?

NL: What I didn’t want to do was create a play that was about religion – there’s no other religious figure in the play – I wanted it to be temporal, showing his connection to a lawyer, a policemen or the child of someone who died in there. And so, I wanted to approach it in a way I hadn’t seen previously on stage. More about the mess you make when you’re trying to clean up a mess.

SR: In so many of your plays, and all the messes you create for your characters, you seem to be winking at the, well, mess. This one feels very different in that regard.

NL: There wasn’t too much of a wink in my approach to it. Honestly, it was a person who was baffled by the circumstances he finds himself in. Oh, God, why did you take a picture? But you did, and it’s worth so much money, and it’s something you could use if you do have a message to get out.

There was the reveal in the final monologue: If I’m honest with myself, he figures, I was one of the ones who was the catalyst for this [mass killing]. That this person who did this, we pushed him, we bullied him. I may have been the catalyst.

Yet I think it’s representative of my life as a playwright to keep asking questions that I don’t have the answers to. I worked on this play, re-wrote it, and I still don’t know if I got it right. Did I create a perfect play. God, no. I know that. Watchable? Has it gotten the right production yet? I don’t know.

One of the questions, I like that part of the job, I like asking questions. I like wrestling with fundamental things like right and wrong and God and faith, and I think that makes certain theater-goers less than comfortable.

Why is this unsavory protagonist the one who’s going to tell me about God? No matter how it’s crafted, you never know how much you’re going to displease everyone. Occasionally you do, maybe that’s the job! There’s nothing you shouldn’t wrestle with.

SR: Whoever said that a protagonist has to be likable? Is Willy Loman likable?

NL: Like, dislike, the key is, they have to be interesting. That’s the path for me. They can be difficult and disarming, but the best ones still compel you to ask are they going to pull themselves out of their mistakes? My job is to write a character who holds your interest.

Katrina Nelson and Villas (Paul M. Rubenstein)

 SR: Was there much development work in the first production?

NL: In New York I was there all the time, re-arranging. Of all my plays, this one is the black sheep of the family. You have a place in your heart, you say, that was the toughest kid to bring up. You love them in a different zone.

I’m adept about writing about “the troubled couple.” But I’ve got to write about what interests me, whether people love it or not.

SR: Are you involved much with the production at City Garage?

NL: Not really. I worked with them on a [recent re-staging of LaBute’s first play] Filthy Talk, and they have a particular approach. If they want my help I’ll help them and jump in.

SR: Do you take a different approach to your comedies from plays like The Break of Noon?

NL: I try not to judge the characters.. I’m obviously not a documentarian, I create fictive worlds. Within those, I create psychologies that make a certain amount of sense, but I don’t really feel judgmental. Although I’ve said things like, it’s funny that people think I’m a misogynist when I think I’m much harder on the men than on the women. I don’t go in saying, oh I hate this guy. Actors have said that, and I say I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know why you signed on. I’m a dramatist, I have to find ways to justify what my characters do.

In The Break of Noon, I was trying to be honest, what would I do if I found myself in this crazy situation. What would I do? And not having a jaundiced view, nor a religious view, what would someone do who has given not too much thought to the beyond and the spiritual and is suddenly confronted with this?

In [LaBute’s 2014] The Money Shot, I found comedy to be very difficult to do. What is it that makes people laugh? That’s your main goal. Those characters were devised for maximum laughter, not for depth of feeling or the worry of getting the emotionality right. The last question is always, is this funny? That’s a different game.

As singular as the people in Noises Off can be, you still want them to be human beings.

The Break of Noon is being performed by City Garage at Bergamot Station Building T1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 24. Sundays pay-what-you-can at the door. (310) 453-9939, www.citygarage.org.