preface

Idon’t love the idea of going back. Not in time, not to see a movie for a second viewing, and not even into a store again to get the correct change. I’m a bit of a shark that way: swim forward or die.

I do go back all the time, though, when it comes to my plays, so I guess I’m a bit of a liar. That, in fact, may be the least of my sins. I tinker with these things endlessly, and not just for new productions but because they’re on my computer and I get bored easily. I’ll find myself on a plane writing a new ending for Fat Pig or an extra monologue for “Adam” in The Shape of Things. A short story based on a short play that came from an idea I had while writing This Is How It Goes. Sometimes these tidbits are used by other directors or myself when tackling a new production, but more often than not they simply sit in a file somewhere, the immediate result of my ever-active imagination. In preparing the main play in this volume for publication, I took a much longer look backward than usual—nearly two decades. Filthy Talk for Troubled Times came out of my graduate work in Kansas, a collection of scenes and monologues that now seem clearly influenced by everyone from Mr. Mamet to Mr. Shepard to my dad when he had a few drinks in him. Wallace Shawn is in there, too, and I hope a bit of Christopher Durang (I used to eat his work for breakfast), and probably a dozen others. It was around this time that I had discovered the modern English playwrights as well, and their freewheeling sense of structure was a big part of my creative life at the time, so a quick tip of the hat to Barker-Bond-Brenton-Churchill-Hare-Pinter-Storey-et al. is necessary. And yet there is the obvious beginning of a “me” stuffed in there also, if only in the margins. Actually, many of the same themes that I continue to write about today—betrayal, gender politics, the isolation of the individual even in close-knit groups, the numbing death that is the workplace, etc.—are represented in this early work. I also still find a lot of it funny and even a little bit true. It was the first play of mine that got some regional attention, and productions would pop up all around the country during the years that followed. I didn’t make a lot of money from it, but it was the play that made me start to feel like a writer.

For better or worse, in terms of both form and content, this is the beginning of Neil LaBute as you might know him today. I continue to love the monologue form you see used here, as well as nameless characters whose dialogue runs roughshod over one another. And I like to cannibalize my own writing. So careful readers might note the joke that was lifted directly out of this play and dropped into the mouth of Aaron Eckhart in the film In the Company of Men. Another piece—one I didn’t include here—became the text for the only short film I’ve ever directed, called Tumble (if you are dying to see it you’ll find it—where else?—on YouTube, featuring Mr. Eckhart’s body and my voice). Filthy Talk for Troubled Times, then, is a kind of headwaters for me, the ground zero of what I’ve tried to accomplish throughout the course of my career (or at least during the period that anyone’s been paying attention). If nothing else, I still think it’s a hell of a title. And it’s for these reasons alone (and the fact that someone once yelled “Kill the playwright!” at me during a production in New York—my Off-Off-Broadway debut, no less) that you should get the chance to read it or perform it or to at least add it to the recycling bin in your laundry room.

The other, shorter works that make up the rest of this collection are a series of scenes and monologues—see? I haven’t changed much—that have been written and performed in the last few years. A few of them have been completed for benefits or festivals (the non-gender-specific Romance grew out of the Sala Beckett theater during a workshop with actors in Barcelona), but most just came to me as ideas and got written because that’s my job and my passion. To write. They don’t always arrive with a home, these smaller plays, but the ideas seem good at the time and I am my own boss so I sit down and type them out. I’ve had the great luck of fine productions and terrific actors taking on these jobs, but each of the shorter pieces are, I hope, also interesting to look at in the context of the earlier, longer work as well. In them, you’ll see that my setting of choice (a couple of people sitting at a table) hasn’t changed much over the years, nor has my penchant for seemingly normal conversations that veer off into the perverse or the unknown. Life is funny and beautiful and weird and I’m here to try to capture some of that on paper. I am an amateur, unfortunately, so I miss a lot of the really gruesome and horrible bits, but hey, I’ll keep on trying. After all, it only takes one tsunami on CNN or an Austrian father with a knack for building underground dwellings to blow my macabre or slightly sinister little tales right out of the water.

In the end, fiction is frighteningly normal when reality decides to rear its ugly head.