New life rises from the ruins

Ben (Craig Hall) tries to persuade lover Abby (Alison Bruce) to run away with him after the Twin Towers collapse in The Mercy Seat.

It is the stuff urban legends are made of: rather than go through a painful and protracted divorce, a businessman wanders away from the ruins of New York's Twin Towers, leaving his family to think he died - perhaps heroically - in the 2001 terrorist attack.

In reality, he skips town with his mistress to begin a new life forever stained by the darkness of that September day.

This scenario, a favourite in internet chatrooms, is the premise on which American playwright Neil LaBute bases his cynical look at modern-day love.

The Mercy Seat takes two self-obsessed lovers, Ben (Craig Hall) and Abby (Alison Bruce), who avoid a fiery death because they were running late for work, having spent the morning in bed together.

Ben has been promising the older and more jaded Abby he will leave his wife and kids. Really. One day. Soon. When he can find it in himself to tell his wife he no longer loves her.

With the towers' collapse, he sees an opportunity to avoid that conversation, if he can persuade Abby to play dead and sneak away with him. Abby, unprepared to abandon her life, is not so keen. Thus begins the verbal sparring and picking over of the ashes of their romance.

While September 11 provides the catalyst for the story, director Rachel House is adamant it is not about the attacks. She says it is a love story about the issues of power and control in relationships. She believes it is a new twist on the age-old story of ill-fated love and that attracted her to directing it. Much has been written about acts of heroism but what about people like Ben who saw a chance to use the tragedy for their own ends?

As House points out, it was not just individuals. Americans were told to go shopping and whole advertising campaigns were built around this: "Out of the unfathomable depths of disasters like this, there were people who made millions of dollars. Why couldn't one individual take advantage of the situation?"

Hall agrees: "Put in the right circumstances, you'll consider your options and that's just what Ben does, however shocking we might find it."

The play has been given added poignancy and context by the London bombings but House, Hall and Bruce had already started research by speaking to Jackie Drew, an American living in New York at the time of September 11.

Drew spoke about her personal experiences in the days after. She remembers friends saying things like, "I feel like I'm eating people," as the dust swirled around them.

LaBute was accused of opportunism by using the disaster as a backdrop for the work. The Mercy Seat opened in New York with Sigourney Weaver and Liev Schreiber 15 months after the towers fell and despite the rebukes, received largely positive reviews.

It is not the first-time LaBute's exploration of the more unappealing side of human nature has attracted criticism. His work is described as consisting of a cruel and vicious battle of the sexes.

This was certainly the case in the controversial 1997 film In the Company of Men about two men who seek out a vulnerable woman to wine and dine only so they can dump her as part of a strike-back at women.

As a Mormon, LaBute's work is often replete with religious imagery. The Mercy Seat, to which the play owes its title, was the top section or lid of the Ark of the Covenant which contained the Ten Commandments.

"Religion runs deep in America," says Bruce, "so you can look at this play from a moral point of view and ask what has the church and religion taught us about right and wrong. But it's more about breaking down those myths."

* The Mercy Seat, by Neil LaBute is at the Silo Theatre, July 28-August 13