Customer Reviews

Bash Latterday Plays

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have had the opportunity to direct this play twice in the past two years (once it was just one of the three plays), and I just can't say enough about how powerful it is. Critics of Labute say he is a mental rapist who is too dark. Read the newspapers and read this play and you will see that this isn't fiction. Like much great theatre it comments on our society and gives us pause. The characters and their situations are memorable, and Labute is a talented, tight writer.

I saw this play last night and am eagerly awaiting it to be in stock again so I can buy it. Like some other reviewers here, I too am struggling for adjectives: brilliant is the best that I can do. It's written almost tenderly-- there is no contempt for these characters although what they do does not merit our love-- and it's written incredibly honestly. It's not at all sentimental, and you will step away from it shaken. Step into this world where celebration and violence are blurred as well as the title promises.

I just put down "Bash" after picking it up an hour ago... was it worth buying?... you better believe it!

Gripping is not strong enough a word to describe this play of extreme violence and dark wit. Brilliant perhaps leaves a better taste in ones mouth. Mr. Labute writes with the lyric power of Vladimir Nabokov and dramatic strength of (dare I say it) William Shakespeare. Labute is the best new playwright on Broadway since Arthur Miller (in the 50s), and "Bash" is the perfect mode through which Labute is able to tell his stories.

My favorite of the one-acts is "A Gaggle of Saints," a dynamic character study that leaves you both spiting and pitying the male lead... Grrr! I still can't get over it! I want more!

I only wish I went to see "Bash" when it was on Broadway this summer... oh well, I have it year-round now!

I have read three plays by Neil Labute - In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbours, and Bash. All three are dark and satiric, but Bash is the most chilling of them all! I enjoyed his plays in Bash because even though they are chilling and haunting, they reflect and dramatize the darkness and evil that exist in society. Labute also does an excellent job at creating complex characters. My favourite play is Medea Redux, where a woman recounts the tragic story of her relationship with her junior school teacher - her character absolutely captivated me - and the ending of the play was unpredictable.

While I hardly think homophobia and murder are confined to Latter-day Saints (I'm a member) this is still powerful, disturbing stuff. LaBute is kind of a Mormon Kubrick: with grim humor he forces you to look at things from which you would rather turn away.

Labute in these three vignettes is remarkably daring, but in ways that in critical discussion are generally ignored. His negativity or "depressing," non-cheery outlook is all that's usually singled out. What is missed is the continuity he establishes between seemingly "cool," emotionally minimalist, postmodern Americans and those anarchic passions of vengefulness, monstrous ambition, and macho rage which motivated the characters in Greek tragedies.
The necessary adjustments being made,the murderous Medea comes back to life in the first of these short pieces, and the equivalent of the daughter-sacrificing Agamennon does the same in the second. The third, perhaps the most shocking of all, features a mad Ajax-like murderer filled with macho rage who's hidden under the sweet-faced normality of the boy next door. Unlike the safe, conventional "American Beauty," whose gay basher was an over-the-top, stereotypical Marine, in "Bash" Labute really does "push the envelope" by making his violent homophobe an otherwise nice,comely, seemingly ideal young Mormon.
Each week, new plays appear which are described in the papers as truly provocative, daring pieces which challenge stale convention. Most of them, however, are only meant to challenge viewers in some mythical Midwest hick town while complacently reasserting the shared assumptions of with-it audiences in the big cities. Labute, on the other hand, actually calls such procedures into question, writing works which really are subversive of complacency. It's no wonder he's currently undervalued.

Bash is three short pieces, two monologues separated by a two hander. All three are surprising in their evolution, as each involves a gradual revelation from the characters in confidence with their "audience." The first piece, Iphigenia in Orem, is about a business man who confides in a stranger a terrible secret. This piece left me shocked and mining the logic of action and the susceptability one has to suggestion. The second piece, A Gaggle of Saints is a disturbing tale of a weekend trip to Manhatten by several Bostonians for a party, which culminates in a vile violent "night cap." The third, Medea Redux is a heart breaking story of young woman's spun world, as she speaks into a recorder inside a mental institution/asylum.
Each piece evokes the violence and sacrifice and desparation of Euripedes plays in a modern sense. The shock and unbelievability of these peoples actions are not lost on them, as they struggle with reason or in A Gaggles of Saints case, bask in it.

This is an incredible play. I think that the Mormon culture is fascinating--actually, I think that any sub-culture that is quirky and not accessible to everyone is fascinating. I live in Utah, and I've noticed that there isn't much media out there that develops the quirky Mormon culture. Most of the stuff available is either "faith promoting," or "bashing," and neither of those extremes really gets into any of the interesting parts of the culture.

Enter Neil Labute--he sets some very interesting stories in the quirky Mormon culture. They aren't faith promoting--they aren't negative toward Mormons...they're just stories set in a quirky Mormon culture.

This isn't a "slice of Mormon life." It is, as I've heard people say, "Good people who happen to do bad things," even though that grossly oversimplifies these stories. The stories are fantastic, and they have the typical Labute macabre.

I suspected that Labute could do Mormons well after the interesting discussion of pornography that he included in "The Shape of Things." But, I was pleasantly surprised by how well he wrote Mormons in a book dedicated to them.

Technical stuff--The book is tiny: 96 pages, and small. Two of the three plays are monologues, and the other is a two-person play. It doesn't have your typical play notes, like "[The lights dim....a bottle breaks in the background]." These "plays" are 100% dialogue.

I knew it would be good, but after reading this book, I'm going to buy all of Labute's plays that are available on amazon.

I remember in the film "My Dinner With Andre," the character played by Andre Gregory puts to his dinner guest the question of what it is that these grim, depressing plays actually do for the modern audience. His take was that they merely confirm the meaninglessness of life that the audience already knows, recognizes and suffers helplessly. "Bash" is exciting and breath-taking in the sense that it is exhilaratingly grim, thoroughly and, therefore memorably, shocking in the sense, perhaps, that one doesn't normally see in the theatre such gruesome acts. But in life they happen everyday - just read the local paper. And so one wonders what such "art" does for the people who watch or read. I don't have the answer. My guess is that we may be horrified by what has been said or shown or described, but I am pleased by the artfulness with which it has been depicted. I like the acting, the lighting, the sets, the music. That gesture, that moan, that cry: it all gives me pleasure. It pleases me to see the horror shown in the theatre because I know it is not real. I suspect that the author gets a kick out of it, too.

Never had a play truly made my stomach turn, but in the first act, in the first small play, it did just that, and pretty much continued at that rate and speed throughout. This interesting understanding of suffering and sacrifice for corporate America, for idealism, for religion, it's the plays that nearly got it's writer, excommunicated from the church. I don't see why, but I do see a great playwright, whose plays are not getting the attention they truly deserve.