"Any shrewd chap who finds his artist
girlfriend has a video-camera in the bedroom to film the cut and thrust of their
sexual action might well fear he was destined to end up as her artistic fodder.
But in THE SHAPE OF THINGS, Neil LaBute's absolutely chilling report from the
sex war's frontline, where stratagems for sexual humiliations are planned, Adam,
the shy chap concerned, takes the video-camera, so to speak, lying down. LaBute,
the remarkable American movie director and playwright whose film IN THE COMPANY
OF MEN showed a sexually unappealing woman exploited by two vengeful pretend
lovers, now returns to this theme. This time it's a man who's the victim of
female guile...
LaBute meticulously plans that the shocking, climatic revelations should cast
dark light upon his apparently average people."
Nicholas de Jongh, The Standard
"[LaBute] continues to probe the
fascinating dark side of individualism, whose ultimate evil is an inability to
imagine the suffering of others....
LaBute's great gift is to live in and to chronicle that murky area of not
knowing, which mankind spends much of its waking life denying. Where does truth
end and fiction begin? Is the fiction more valuable than the truth? Do the
results justify the means?"
John Lahr, The New Yorker
"What is art? What are you permitted to
do in its name?...
These questions are thrown up by a piece whose intricate layers of treachery are
worthy of David Mamet..."
Paul Taylor, The Independent
"LaBute is a smart, ambitious writer
who, at his best, dares to explore the ambivalence hiding under the weave of our
social fabric. He always has a serious intellectual project in mind, and here he
aims at no less than the subjectivity of love and the definition of art itself.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS is compulsively watchable."
Gordon Cox, Newsday
"LaBute is the most gifted, intelligent
and wittily moral American playwright since Wallace Shawn; that is high praise,
believe me.
And this play marks his theatrical maturity. It's a must see."
Michael Coveney, Daily Mail
originally produced at the Almedia,
London
subsequently at The Promenade
Theater, New York
2 M, 2 F
I S B N: 0-88145-222-X
$9.95