Shape Of Things To Come [Paperback]

At first glance the play seems like it may be quite ordinary. it features the relationship dramas of four young college students in a tangled web of couples swapping and reconciling. As a playwright many of Labute's styles can be attributed to other influences. The punctuated rhythms of his dialogue and ear for exact phrases and slang resemble Mamet, and he is a well trained playwright- well versed in contemporary theater (particularly his most recent play in England and its Bond influences).
Labute's talent however seems to lie in his ideas on cruelty and bizarre relationship dynamics and sadistic, dark plot twists which are a feature of his first two films, certainly this play, and his latest work "Distance from Here." In this particular work Labute infuses ideas about the nature and role of art in the world into his relationships. While three of the main characters are somewhat typical midwestern middle class liberal arts students, their world is shaken by an art student that enters into their lives and begins to use them as her palette. She transforms life itself into a work of art through her manipulations. The twisted dynamics, anguish and frustration in the play is painful to experience and particularly visceral.

Meanwhile, the form ties into the themes. As a piece of live theater the audience nearly becomes complicit in the crime by patronizing a work of art that features lives torn apart and altered on stage. The climax in a lecture theater with its twist was probably staged in such a way that the audience became participants and active in the main character's anguish and undoing.

While this piece does have its flaws, it is a gripping and incredible play that functions not only well as a drama, but as a sophisticated discussion of the theater. This play is conscious about why theater is a fascinating art form and uses that to its advantage.

Several years ago, PBS distributed to subscribers a particularly annoying, idiotic button announcing that with-it people "Fear No Art." Even though such heralded types as Plato and Tolstoy had worried about the artist's frightening power to create as well as to wreak havoc on the social order, PBS thought it knew better. Artists these days are basically nice people, it held, and thus they will necessarily use their powers of self-expression only to enrich the lives of everyone in society. Consequently, we must be open to and accepting of whatever an artist comes up with - even a crucifix in a bottle of urine - lest we be thought narrow-minded or indeed intolerant. Neil Labute looking at the current scene with wide open eyes challenges the complacency in this conventional thinking about the "nice" artist and life. In "The Shape Of Things," he vividly brings home to us the truth in Jonathan Swift's observation that "nice people are full of nasty ideas." Set among campus Me-First postmoderns who delve into art and engage in tangled "relationships," Labute's play gives its characters free rein to reveal themselves as both pathetically and hilariously stunted human specimens. Their seeming one-dimensionality is by satiric design, as are those hints of rage and clueless meanness which occasionally ooze out from beneath their laid-back surfaces to enrich the key moments of dramatic encounter. Like many of the sardonic Ibsen's characters, Labute's too have snarling trolls lurking just beneath their "nice," ever so tolerant, "non-judgmental" public selves. Most significantly, his charismatic, rebellious central female figure, her inner person reduced wholly and subhumanly to warped aesthetic concerns, emerges as a satiric embodiment of the postmodern artist as essentially destructive creator.
To any mainstream critic who goes to plays and demands "positive" or "compassionate" endorsements of the received ideas we hold or our self-absorbed lives as we generally live them now, Labute has little to offer. Refreshingly free of such frothy, mindless cheer, the playwright instead skewers unquestioned contemporary notions of art's necessary beneficence and those of the glories of untrammeled individualism. Human nature and art, he reveals as satiric dramatist, are both larger and more problematic than such currently genteel, fashionable conceptions of them. Far from being "non-original" in his ideas, Labute more than any other current playwright provokingly calls into question the actual - not the putative - received ideas about art and life which are thought "cutting edge" in our time. If anyone writing drama today could produce a fully realized masterwork on the way we live now, I suspect it would be Neil Labute.

I've always admired the work of Labute, but admittedly never got around to reading or seeing "The Shape of Things." Needless to say, then, when I finally did get to read it, I began with high expectations. And these expectations were met. "Shape of Things" is a startlingly crisp and wittily written piece that examines the form of "art" and just how far it can be taken. Without a doubt, this is an artist's play, and certainly one of the most groundbreaking dramas of recent years. The end will knock your socks off... particularly if you don't see what's coming!