The Morning Line

THE MORNING LINE DATE: Wednesday, May 20, 2015 FROM: Michelle Farabaugh, Melissa Cohen, Jennie Mamary Katie Aramento, Eliza Ranieri PAGES: 19, including this page. May 20, 2015 Sheen Center Cancels Event Featuring Neil LaBute Play About ‘Mohammed’ By Jennifer Schuessler A downtown Manhattan performance center has canceled an event featuring a new play by Neil LaBute with a title making reference to “Mohammed,” on the grounds that the play is offensive to Muslims. The event, called “Playwrights for a Cause” and featuring four new short plays about censorship in the arts, was set to take place on June 14 at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in Greenwich Village, as the opening of the Planet Connections Theater Festivity, a monthlong arts festival at various locations. On Tuesday, the Sheen Center canceled the contract for the event, which was organized as a benefit for the National Coalition Against Censorship. William Spencer Reilly, the executive director of the Sheen Center, said in an email that the play and its title was not in keeping with the mission of the center, which opened last year with funding from the archdiocese of New York and is named for former Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. “When an artistic project maligns any faith group, that project clearly falls outside of our mission to highlight the good, the true, and the beautiful as they have been expressed throughout the ages,” Mr. Reilly said, referring to the center’s mission statement, which describes it as serving Catholic and non-Catholic audiences alike. The Sheen Center, he added, “will not be a forum that mocks or satirizes another faith group.” Mr. LaBute’s one-person play, which was written for the event, is about an actor asked to perform in an offensive satire. A description posted online reads: “The prophet ‘Mohammed’ stands on a barren stage, recalling the first time he made love to a white woman. Is this reality or a theatrical convention? Where do the lines between ‘satire’ and ‘censorship’ intersect or is nothing sacred when it comes to the theater?” The play’s title refers to “Mohammed” as having an erection. In an email, Mr. LaBute said that the play did not depict “the actual prophet ‘Muhammad’ (spelled differently than my title),” but declined to say more, citing his desire to preserve the audience’s sense of surprise. In an email, Glory Kadigan, the founder of Planet Connections, described the play as “a discussion of whether or not it’s all right to poke fun at religion or religious figures.” She said the group did not have titles or scripts for the plays when the contract was signed. “None of us knew what the writers would write,” she said. The group is seeking another stage, she said. Mr. Reilly said he had signed the contract in February but had only become aware of the play’s title earlier this week, after a staff member noticed it on the Planet Connections website. After seeing the script, he decided to cancel the event in light of what he called the play’s “clear offense to Muslims.” Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000 The other plays written for the occasion — by Erik Ehn, Halley Feiffer and Israel Horovitz — treat censorship issues relating to race, gender and sexuality, which were also set to be discussed in a panel discussion following the performances. Mr. LaBute, in a statement, said the Sheen Center was “was absolutely within their right” in canceling the contract but said he was saddened by the decision. “This event was meant to shine another light on censorship and it was unexpected to have the plug pulled, quite literally, by an organization that touts the phrase ‘for thought and culture’ on their very Web site,” Mr. LaBute said. “Both in life and in the arts, this is not a time to hide or be afraid; recent events have begged for artists and citizens to stand and be counted.” May 20, 2015 Review: ‘The Way We Get By’ After a One-Night Stand By Ben Brantley Anyone who’s ever woken up in a strange apartment with an unexpected bedmate and a deathly hangover will appreciate the brute fear that pervades the first moments of “The Way We Get By,” a slight but spirited new play by Neil LaBute, which opened on Tuesday night at Second Stage Theater. It’s not just the pained walk of that man in his boxer shorts (Thomas Sadoski), lumbering across the stage like a zombie in search of brains, that commands instant pity and terror. So does the what-the-hell-have-I-done expression plastered on his face like a “Wanted” sign, and the subtle, ominous hum (the throb of conscience or merely traffic in the distance?) that underscores every step he takes. Since this is a work by Mr. LaBute, who as a filmmaker and dramatist loves to play nasty games in the dark, we are prepared to assume the worst. Like the presence of a decapitated corpse somewhere on the premises, or an old troll with a satisfied leer waiting under stained sheets. Surprise! The only thing lurking in the other room turns out to be a gorgeous woman — played, as it happens, by a gorgeous movie star, Amanda Seyfried, wearing only a “Star Wars” T-shirt. This is no waking nightmare; it’s a red-blooded American boy’s dream come true! Thomas Sadoski and Amanda Seyfried star in this play by Neil LaBute about an encounter with unexpected consequences. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times But wait. Why does this boy, Doug (Mr. Sadoski), seem so reluctant to return to bed with this girl, Beth (Ms. Seyfried), after what has clearly been an ecstatic experience for both? Why do they flinch whenever the conversation leans toward what they might have in common? Who, or what, is being betrayed in this uncomfortable setup? At this point, dear theatergoer, you might want to stop reading if you have any intention of seeing “The Way We Get By,” which has been directed with finesse by Leigh Silverman, although I’ll try to be discreet. Or stay with me till the end of this paragraph, so I can say that there are several good reasons to see the show (it’s short, it’s sexy, it’s starry, it’s well acted) and others not to (it’s contrived, it’s manipulative and even at 70 minutes, too long for its limited purposes). Your call. For those of you still with me, I can report that “The Way We Get By” is both thoroughly typical and atypical of Mr. LaBute, who relishes the art of thwarting expectations. Like the three short works in “Bash: Latter-Day Plays,” which made his reputation as a dramatist, “The Way We Get By” hinges on a screw-turning reversal or two. Those plays began with seeming blandness, then took hairpin turns into lands of unsettling, retributive grimness. So did subsequent macabre dramas like “The Mercy Seat” and “Wrecks.” But then there was a period, starting with his Tony-nominated “reasons to be pretty” (starring Mr. Sadoski), in which Mr. LaBute forsook his misanthropic snarl for a tentative, hopeful smile. Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000 Mr. LaBute wears both expressions in “The Way We Get By,” in which shocks are succeeded by the equivalent of comforting pats on the arm. His troublemaking side is only teasingly in evidence. Here he has it both ways, in an extended sketch of a boy-meets-(or remeets)-girl rom-com. As is usual with Mr. LaBute, the boy is, well, a boy, with the embarrassing immaturity implicit in that description, although he appears to be over 30. The girl is a vulnerable knockout, weary of beauty’s burdens. This is another classic LaBute archetype, previously embodied by actresses like Piper Perabo and Amanda Peet. (Mr. LaBute’s plays have been catnip to rising young stars of Hollywood, a cultural capital he gleefully detonated in last season’s “The Money Shot.”) In this case, the classic mating dance, with its steps of advancement and retreat, takes place in the annoyingly well-organized apartment that Beth shares with an (absent) anal-retentive roommate. (Neil Patel did the appropriately accoutered set.) Doug and Beth are awkward with each other, as befits a couple on the morning after a one-night stand. Yet they are also reflexively at ease, especially when they roughhouse like kids. The complications suggested by this couple’s layers of comfort and discomfort are given convincing physical life by the two performers. Mr. Sadoski (a star of “The Newsroom” on HBO) is a veteran stage actor, and he finds a charming assortment of vocal and kinetic variations on an arrested-development specimen we’ve all come to know well from recent fiction, film and, of course, Mr. LaBute’s plays. Ms. Seyfried, whose screen work includes “Les Misérables,” “While We’re Young” and television’s “Big Love,” is new to theater, and she needs to develop her speaking voice, which at this point is small for the stage. But her timing, comic and dramatic, is beyond reproach. And if she and Mr. Sadoski tend to talk at distractingly different decibel levels, there’s no denying the genuine chemistry that flickers between them, and occasionally flares into something dangerously irresistible. The back-and-forth changes of emotional direction in the final moments of “The Way We Get By” tax credibility.

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