Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

78 Chapter 4 The Playwright
Photo Essay: Playwright Neil LaBute*
With his twenty-one plays on and
off Broadway since 1989, Neil
LaBute is one of America’s most prolific
and admired playwrights. In 2006,
in his Los Angeles-area home, Neil
LaBute chatted with one of the book’s
authors about his life as a working
writer of films and plays. Excerpts from
the conversation follow (RC indicates
Robert Cohen; NL, Neil LaBute).
RC: Where do you do your writing?
NL: Anywhere the feeling seizes me.
I do a lot of writing on airplanes.
I usually fly at night, and most of
the time I stay up and write. But I
find that I can write in most places:
I’ll perch on any windowsill or sit
down in the grass or wherever.
I don’t feel I have to write from
eight in the morning ’til noon, or
anything like that; I write only when
I feel compelled to. Usually I circle
around my computer like a shark,
closing in until I say, “I have to do
this” and then sit down and begin.
RC: What are your usual starting points?
Do you get captured by a story or
. . .?
NL: Sometimes it’s a story, but it could
be as simple as a line of dialogue
you have in your head. It may
come to you in bed, like “Let’s hurt
somebody!” I thought of that line
and said, “That’s a provocative
notion. What does that mean? What
are we going to do with that?” And
so one script [In the Company of
Men, LaBute’s first film] sprang
from that. By the time I made the
film, I ended up putting it at the
end of the first scene rather than
the beginning, but that line was the
catalyst for the whole script. Maybe
then comes a character. Or an idea.
In one case it was: “I want to say
something about art.” So who’s
going to do this? “It’s going to be
an artist and a girl.” So who does
she need to work with? And then
characters come to me: The Shape
of Things grew out of that kind of
dialogue with myself. Sometimes
it’s simply a title. I admired the
title of the Aimee Mann song
“This Is How It Goes.” But what
does that title mean? I ask myself
these kinds of questions, and very
often something grows out of it: in
that case it was something about
(pause) the flexibility of truth.
Places I tend not to look for
material are those right in front of
me. I don’t look at “me” to give me
inspiration. I don’t say, “Oh, this
is a great story from my youth”
or about my parents, or how they
got together, and I don’t look in
the newspaper for stories—which
are usually more amazing than
the ones I come up with, actually.
What’s in the newspaper is
breathtaking stuff, it’s real. For me
it always seems to come just from
my imagination, but I never know
where it’s going to take me next.
RC: One thing I always see in your
writing is peer pressure: how
groups of people transform us and
affect what we do. Does this come
from personal experience or . . .?
NL: Well, I suppose it does, I mean, it
can’t help but start there, but I’ve
still never written from personal
experience. My interest is in the
two selves that we have, the public
and private self, the worlds that
people juggle a lot of time just
from being out there in the world:
being one kind of person while
trying to be another person. Or
being “this” person and knowing
this group over here won’t like me
if they know “this” about me, so
trying to keep “this” person from
them. The fact that this often leads
to us becoming a smoldering wreck
because of trying to maintain this
deception is fascinating stuff.
RC: Betrayal and deception also seem
common themes.
NL: Yes, a lot of what I write is about
people being betrayed, or people
who have a confession—oneperson
monologues which are
a kind of confession: “I can’t tell
anybody else what I’ve done, so I’m
telling you . . .” In fact, that’s what’s
going on in [my 2006 play] Wrecks,
which is a kind of moral exploration
that [actor Ed] Harris nightly makes
to an audience. He talks glowingly
about love and I believe that he
believes in it, but the big question
for me is can you love somebody
that you have deceived from the
day you met them? And I don’t
know the answer to that. That’s
the beauty of being a writer: I don’t
have to know things. Fuck, I don’t
know! (Laughter) But I do love the
investigation.
I don’t write from a place of
knowledge. I’m not saying, “I’m
going to raise this question just
Neil LaBute’s reasons to be happy, which
premiered off-Broadway in 2013, is a sequel
to his 2008 reasons to be pretty, treating the
same principal characters who, after breaking
up during the first play, are trying to get back
together in the second—although they are this
time dealing with a marriage on one hand and
a separate affair on the other. Josh Hamilton
and Jenna Fischer are the principal actors.
© Joan Marcus *Courtesy of Neil LaBute