cover design by Charlotte Strick, cover photographs by Jeff Williams
Can someone honestly love a person they have deceived for thirty years? This is the central question behind WRECKS, Neil LaBute's latest foray into the dark side of human nature. Meet Edward Carr: adoring father, successful businessman, grieving widower. In this concise powerhouse of a play, LaBute limns the boundaries of love, exploring the extent of what society will accept as opposed to what the heart will desire.
"[WRECKS is a] tasty morel of a
play... The profound empathy that has always informed LaBute's work, even at its
most stringent, is expressed more directly and urgently than ever here."
Elysa Gardner, U S A Today
"WRECKS is bound to identified
by its shock value. but it must also be cherished for the moment-by-moment
pleasure of its masterly portraiture. There is not an extraneous syllable in
LaBute's enormously moving love story."
Linda Winer, Newsday
"[In WRECKS] Mr LaBute...uses
prototypes from Greek myths as the basis for his central story, finding Olympian
extremes of behavior amid lives that seem as unthreateningly ordinary as those
of your friends and neighbors (to borrow the title of a LaBute film)...
[However,] the literary precedents that come most pointedly to mind aren't
Sophocles and Euripides by W Somerset Maugham and O Henry, old-fashioned writers
of riddles of short stories in which pieces gradually click into a completed
picture that whispers, `Gotcha!'"
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
1 M
world premiere at the Everyman Palace
Theatre, Cork, Ireland
U S premiere at the Public Theater, New York
This volume also features a collection of
rarely staged short plays:
LIARS CLUB, UNION SQUARE, LOVE AT TWENTY, LAND OF THE DEAD, STAND-UP, COAX, &
FALLING IN LIKE.
I S B N: 0-88145-243-2, $12.95