The killer instinct

By PETER CALDER

You can't spend long talking to Neil LaBute without wanting to ask the obvious question: "What's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?"

In interview, even down a scratchy phone line from Chicago, LaBute, 40 last month, is as engaging a fellow as might be imagined: the cheerful, self-effacing voice rhymes perfectly with the jowly, owlish visage in published pictures of the writer.

But the place where he - or at least his creative imagination - seems always to land is in a universe where humans, red in tooth and claw, manipulate and eviscerate each other in a remorseless struggle for supremacy and revenge.

That's what was on show in the first work that brought him to international notice, a film called In The Company of Men in which two embittered yuppies on a business trip conspire to seduce and then brutally discard a guileless, young (and deaf) office junior. The normally broadminded Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times thundered that the film was "the psychological equivalent of a snuff movie", but LaBute just shrugged and said, "We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch; we shred each other with what we say."

The same killer instinct is let loose in The Shape of Things, LaBute's 2001 play which opens next week at Auckland's Maidment Theatre. The play, which has been described as a frontline report from the gender wars, is a vicious modern spin on the Pygmalion story. In a middle American university town, the carefully named Adam and Evelyn meet. He's a nerdy English major, she's a somewhat mysterious artist and, as their relationship develops she begins to make a few changes - to him. He cuts his hair, loses weight, stops dressing funny, stops biting his nails.

By the time the words "cosmetic surgery" crop up, her "improvements" have begun to take on a slightly sinister tone. But LaBute hasn't even got started. Evelyn's corrosive effect on Adam and on his relationship with his two best friends culminates in a shocking finale which reveals her protestation that "I'm a very straightforward person" to be monstrously inaccurate.

Anybody who tells you how it turns out is not a friend. But it does raise the question of whether LaBute has a irredeemably bleak view of human affairs.

"Not really," he says. "There's more to humans than what you see in my work. But my passion is storytelling and to me it's fascinating to write about the way relationships turn into power struggles and manipulations.

"The way Evelyn behaves may not be universal but it's not impossible. If the stories are improbable that just means they're not documentaries. I've been accused of just about everything but no one ever accused me of writing science fiction. No one says, 'I don't recognise that woman at all.' They might say my characters are unattractive but no one says they aren't recognisable."

What's most impressive about the play's climax is that it takes place in a moral landscape which is undergoing something of an earthquake. LaBute has Evelyn tell us that she's offering us a lesson on manipulation, on our obsession with "the shape of things" but because she herself has just engaged in the most monstrous act of manipulation, it's hard to hear her saying it. The effect is electrifying and more than a little uncomfortable, but LaBute makes no apology for the discomfort.

"The thing about the play is that no one is a clear winner at the end," he says. "I always tend to ride the fence. People want to know where I stand but I usually don't say. I don't want to say which side I'm on - or rather I'm on the side of the characters and letting them be true to themselves, and if that means that things don't end the way you want them to end that's too bad for you. That's just the way stories often unfold. They don't come to a perfect conclusion and people who have done things don't pay for what they have done."

Unsurprisingly, LaBute's work has earned him his share of vilification. It amuses him that people's reactions are so varied - In The Company Of Men was subjected to swingeing attacks for being variously feminist and misogynist - but he laps it all up.

"I'm relatively thick skinned," he says, "so I read everything I can get my hands on because I'm interested. I don't work in a vacuum and I want to see what people's responses are."

But if his thematic preoccupations attract odium, LaBute's work - as writer and, latterly, director - has also earned him his share of bouquets. Company won the Filmmakers Trophy at Sundance, America's pre-eminent festival of independent film and his first studio film, the marvellous Nurse Betty, which starred Renee Zellweger, was in competition at Cannes. If his tepid, muddled adaptation of A.S. Byatt's literary whodunit Possession was a disappointment, the upcoming film version of The Shape of Things promises to redeem matters somewhat.

He continues, though, to regard himself as a writer. "I'm more comfortable with writing than directing," he says. "I love making movies but I thrive on the writing. The thing I love about the theatre is that it pares things back to the essentials - the actors and the text. I am new to film. I didn't live and breathe it from an early age. There are a lot of aspects of it I am still learning about and a lot of aspects that I am not interested in. Even the camera itself. I don't operate it, so I don't look at it much. I'm much more interested in the actors and in the theatre that's what you are primarily working with."

Certainly, the writing seems to come easy: Shape took shape in barely a fortnight, over a Christmas break in the editing of Possession.

"Obviously I had been thinking about it for a while. I was so tired of thinking about [Possession's] characters, I needed a break from them. The only way to do that was to think about something else consciously so I very specifically sat down and worked on the play and by the time the holiday was over I was pretty much done.

"Then I sort of walked right into a production. When I got back into London there was a message on my cellphone from the Almeida [Theatre] where I'd done a play the year previously. They were looking for something to do and so we slotted it in and four months after I'd written it we were on stage."

What baffles many people looking at LaBute's work is that the man - a graduate of Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah - is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as a Mormon.

He admits that his adherence to a faith which at least appears authoritarian, doctrinaire and conservative, is at odds with such artistic iconoclasticism. But his trio of plays about three violent and disturbed individuals changed all that. bash: latterday plays "was not about the church but about people who happened to be members of the church," LaBute says.

"But I got into some trouble with the church and I continue to be in that [trouble]. It will probably come to some head which will not be excommunication but something close to it. Ultimately I will be asked to decide whether I want to continue in the church or continue to work the way I am.

"Like all good writers I continue procrastinating for as long as I can, but I will at some point have to decide and a decision will be made.

"I understand the dichotomy for some people, that the church and my work don't seem to go hand in hand. I've been able to reconcile it quite easily - but then I'm a great self-justifier."

Performance

* What: The Shape of Things

* Where: Maidment Theatre

* When: preview Thurs April 24; April 26-May 17