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by Neil LaBute, directed by Robert Vaughn

Leach & Levy, Inc., Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

September 11-21, 2013

“A Misfire from LaBute”

   

Neil LaBute’s latest play In a Forest Dark and Deep from 2011, now receiving its Canadian premiere, is quite disappointing.  The play’s structure is so laboured and clunky it’s hard to believe it was written by the same person as the elegant one-acter Romance (2010).  It’s in the old realist form beloved of American playwrights – estranged family members get together, secrets are revealed – but in this case, the secret that is meant to be the supreme revelation is obvious at least a half hour or more before it is announced.  The two leads give fine performances but they are not enough to conceal the play’s contrivance.

Audience members entering the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace will be amazed to find the most elaborate, realistically detailed set ever to be built in that space.  Gavin Mitchell has designed the interior of a book-lined, two-storey room in a cabin in the woods that looks exactly right for the kind of location LaBute describes – an academic study off in the woods.  Mitchell and lighting designer Nelson Rogers have even set up a rain machine through which they shine a lamp casting the shadows of a constant fall of rain on the stage right wall.  So many minimalist productions have played in this space, it’s a surprise to see it used so well in such a different style.

To this isolated forest in the middle of a thunderstorm, Betty (Jennifer Gibson) has summoned her brother Bobby (Damon Runyan), with whom she has never got along.  That she should turn to him for help, rather than her husband or her colleagues from work, immediately makes him suspicious.  Bobby, a carpenter, is strong and has a truck and she has to clear out the cabin of most of its contents by tomorrow when prospective renters will be turning up.  She, the dean of a nearby university, says she had been renting the cabin to a student who has left without notice. 

When Bobby comes across a photo of the student hugging Betty, he knows she has been lying and presses her for the true story.  As it turns out, Betty bought the cabin without her husband’s knowledge specifically as a retreat for her and the student with whom she was having an affair.  This episode in the play begins a structure of repetition that makes a play tedious that wants rather too obviously to be a thriller. 

At least four more times during the one-hour fifty-minute running time, Bobby and Betty get into an argument, Bobby accuses Betty of hiding the truth, Betty denies it, Bobby states his suspicion and his evidence for it, Betty denies it yet again, Bobby becomes insistent, Betty finally admits the truth and Bobby and Betty make up – that is, until another argument arises.  In these repeated arguments LaBute even has the siblings fling the same recriminations at each other.  Betty says that Bobby has made nothing of his life and has never been able to have a stable relationship.  Bobby says that the Betty may be highly regarded in academic circles but that she has embarrassed the family since her teenaged years by her promiscuous ways.  The one variation occurs when it is Bobby’s secret that is uncovered – his incestuous desire for Betty.  LaBute drops that into the play out of the blue, probably because he realizes how little motivation Bobby has to be helping his sister.  Then LaBute immediately forgets about it and has the momentarily outraged Betty snuggling in Bobby’s lap at the end. 

During each round of arguments we do hear more detail, especially about Betty, but ultimately the repetitions come across as an artificial structural device to allow LaBute to dole out the siblings’ secret in a piecemeal fashion.  This makes the play feel about 45 minutes longer that is should be, and since anyone familiar with mystery novels will have already figured out the “big” secret long before it is revealed on stage, the play doesn’t even have that as a payoff.

LaBute wants the siblings to appear as opposites but he succeeds so well that it becomes improbable that they could have been raised in the same family.  Early on LaBute has Bobby makes a series of sexist, racist and anti-gay remarks that set him up as a stereotypical redneck “Christian” bigot.  Betty’s indignation at Bobby’s all-encompassing bigotry is meant to put us on her side as the more reasonable of the two.  Yet, even though Bobby is uninterested in the complexity of society, he is single-mindedly interested in the truth about Betty.  Similarly, Betty’s initial appearance of reasonableness is undercut the more we find out about a promiscuity bordering on nymphomania.  Academic halls being the gossip mills they are, it’s impossible to believe that her affairs with colleagues and students could be so well hidden that she would ever be chosen dean.  Meanwhile, Bobby may be interested in pursuing the truth, but does nothing with it once he finds out each of Betty’s secrets.  He is quite able to readjust his strong moral core to suit whatever she says.

Given the artificial situation, the schematic plotting and characters who feel like fabricated embodiments of obvious contradictions rather than real people, director Robert Vaughn and actors Jennifer Gibson and Damon Runyan have to work hard to get us involved in the story.  Vaughn’s direction generally emphasizes rather than disguises the similarity of each cycle of arguments, right to repetitions of blocking like having Bobby push Betty’s back up against the stage right bookcase just before a revelation.  Vaughn does, however, draw strong performances from both principals. 

Runyan begins his performance in marble-mouthed fashion so little he says is clear.  As the play progresses his diction steadily improves.  He states Bobby’s bigoted opinions so matter-of-factly that they are almost funny, but he gives the character a continual sense of wariness as if he is always reassessing the situation to discover what is really going on.

Gibson, looking hurt and vulnerable, takes us in as she almost does Bobby about her essential innocence.  Yet, soon enough she lets us see what Bobby sees, that despite her tears and tone of sincerity, she is an inveterate liar.  Gibson draws our interest by making us look as keenly as Bobby does to tell if what she says and does is real or feigned. 

Theatre-goers who have been following the work of Neil LaBute will want to see his latest even if it is far from his best.  Fans of Gibson and Runyan familiar from their extensive work in film and television will want to see how excellent they are on stage.  Anyone else, however, looking for a challenging night of theatre will find that LaBute’s latest play is dull thriller, about as flimsy as the cardboard boxes Betty and Bobby have been given to pack books in.  You can’t help wishing they were in a better play, say Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love (1983), where the brother-sister relationship takes on a symbolic resonance that LaBute never achieves.      

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Jennifer Gibson and Damon Runyan.  ©2013 Leach & Levy Inc.

For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.