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Wrecks: And Other Plays

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In "Wrecks," Neil Labute returns to the world of his early "bash," once more bringing Greek drama and its insights to bear on contemporary American experience. In this new dramatic monologue, he updates the tale of Oedipus Rex, filling with inventive and illuminating parallels the story of Ed Carr, abandoned as an infant, later an ambitious, successsful businessman who rents classic autos and thus becomes in his small way an American "empire builder," and most significantly of all, the second husband of an older woman, Jo.

To understand LaBute's play, a viewer or reader, I'd argue, would first of all have to grasp the philosophical background which the author takes for
granted. LaBute's contemporary America is the world Dostoevsky forecast when he suggested, in "The Brothers Karamazov," that if God is dead, there are no ultimate sanctions. In other words, everything's permitted.

Ed Carr, in his unwitting blindness, is fully at home in such a world. Private choice and consistency to it are the only regnant values. Though he doesn't like people of the younger generation who flaunt their freakishness in public, he has no objection to any sort of freakishness if its indulger keeps it private. Among other practices, Ed smokes incessantly, since this gives him pleasure and therefore is nobody else's business. That his wife may have gotten the cancer which killed her from secondhand smoke, that he himself is currently suffering from cancer as well - these are the consequences of a Fate which likes to surprise us, he asserts, not the result of one's own actions for which one might bear some responsibility.

Ed's choice in marriage forms a perfect parallel to his addiction to smoking. If something gives him pleasure, then it's to be pursued with the tenacity of a "pit bull" in attack mode. No other restraints on human behavior are applicable, since the pursuit of personal happiness is all, and there are no longer any taboos. Clearly, we've travelled quite a downhill distance from the original intent behind the phrase, "the pursuit of happiness." Nowadays, LaBute reveals here, it indicates an extreme individualism, removing its follower from any recognizable sense of being a social animal, binding him instead to mere pleasurable impulse rather than to the higher realms of thought or humane emotion.

If LaBute has any "compassion" for his characters, it's a kind of pity for their human stuntedness, their bondage to a world of vanity and mere impulse, since this may be all they know or have at their disposal. In other words, they may be following their best lights, and as such may represent a frightening, new kind of human being, the sincere knave.

For LaBute fans, this small collection of monologues and one acts is great. It is also a terrific practice session for actors developing some skill with modern/ post modern take on our life.