ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS A TOUCH OF BAD Why is the director Neil LaBute so interested in jerks? 6 BY JOHN LAHR NCE upon a time in the early play “Lepers,” is a sexual merry-go-round nineties, in the irony-free zone among friends. Together, the two films O of Off Off Broadway, the are a kind of “Rake’s Progress,” and La- writer and director Neil LaBute sat on- Bute’s model for them is Restoration stage doing triple duty as an actor in his comedy, which, as he explained to me barroom play, “Filthy Talk for Troubled when we met in Hollywood this spring, Times: Scenes of Intolerance.” One of “gets down to the dirt of the way we live the barflies was in the middle of a riff with each other and treat each other.” He about AIDS and about her fear of infec- pays homage to his source in “Your Friends tion—“I say, put them all in a fucking and Neighbors” when, during a rehearsal pot and boil them . just as a precau- of Wycherley’s “The Country Wife,” the tion”—when a member of the audience drama professor and sleazy sexual preda- sitting right up front shouted, “Kill the tor, Jerry (Ben Stiller), sitting in the audi- playwright!” LaBute, who is thirty-eight torium in periwig and frock coat, explains and whose wiry black hair and pug to his cuckolded best friend, Barry (Aaron nose give him the look of a large, ami- Eckhart), why he bedded his wife: able hedgehog, says his first thought was “to get to the exit, to lead the crowd JERRY:...I just feel...Fuck,I don’t know how to put this, I just feel... out to safety”; another part of him was BARRY: “Bad”? thrilled, because “people were listening JERRY: “Bad.” Exactly! Bad. enough to go out of their way to make a BARRY: I mean, my wife . JERRY: I’m sorry. response.” The angry patron stayed for BARRY: The same hotel room even. the rest of the play, which is a testament JERRY: I am sorry. to LaBute’s good writing and to his BARRY:Yeah... canny view of theatre and film as “a con- JERRY: But I ...I mean, I still feel... BARRY:...“Bad.” tact sport,” which “should be the most of JERRY: Right. “Bad.” whatever it is—the most joy, the most terror.” The moral and emotional noncha- LaBute, whose first play-turned-film, lance of LaBute’s characters echoes the “In the Company of Men” (1997), made amorality and privilege of the Resto- his name and also earned him the sobri- ration fops, who, LaBute has said, are quet “the angriest white male,” courts “well-to-do people with time on their provocation not for the sake of shock but hands who go around hurting each to make an audience think against its other, doing things that are pretty un- own received opinions. His production pleasant, just because the opportunity company is mischievously called Con- presents itself.” The original court enter- temptible Entertainment; his work is tainments emphasized the notion of ap- cruel, dark, and often very funny. “In the pearance versus authenticity. “Behind that Company of Men” is about two corpo- great sense of costume—the wigs and rate eager beavers—the venomous Chad makeup—there was a sense that all was and his sidekick, Howard—who conspire well, even while bugs were crawling in to find a vulnerable woman, woo her, and the wigs and the physical self was falling then hurt her. “It’s a simple story,” La- apart,” LaBute said. “There was still the Bute wrote in the introduction to the sense that it was better to look good than published screenplay. “Boys meet girl, to feel good.” LaBute’s contemporary boys crush girl, boys giggle.” “Your Friends fops have no authentic self to hide: they and Neighbors” (1998), adapted from his are all façade. He links this to the nineties LaBute, center, with actors from “Bash” and “Nurse Betty”: Ron Eldard, Paul Rudd, PHILIP BURKE Calista Flockhart, Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, and Chris Rock. obsession with style and with the insis- “Neil always wants you to personalize his count a road trip to New York City with tence on appearance as reality. “There’s a work,” says the actor Aaron Eckhart, who a few Mormon college friends for a party huge sense in the nineties of ‘I can be- starred in both “In the Company of at the Plaza. During the day’s long trajec- come anything I want as long as I present Men” and “Your Friends and Neighbors,” tory of good times, the guys find them- it tenaciously enough.’ Clinton would be and has a part in the forthcoming “Nurse selves attacking a homosexual in a Cen- a fair example.” Betty,” LaBute’s first mainstream Holly- tral Park latrine: LaBute, who calls himself “a part-time wood movie and the only one of his films Tim leans into him one more time, takes moralist,” is a practicing Mormon; he that he has not written. “He wants you a little run at it, smashing his foot against converted to the faith in the early eight- to say, ‘I’m that person’ or ‘I have the bridge of this man’s nose and I see it ies, before he married Lisa Gore, a psy- done that.’ ” give way. Just pick up and move to the other chotherapist who is deeply involved with side of his face. Wow. And then it’s silence. For the same reasons, in his stage Not a sound. And for the first time, we look the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. work LaBute favors the black box—the over at Dave....What’s he thinking? And The Mormon obsession with moral im- unadorned proscenium—and the con- right then, as if to answer us through reve- provement and with “pretending nothing fines of the monologue. His versatility lation . he grabs up the nearest trash can, big wire mesh thing, raises it above his bad happens,” as he says, accounts in in this form is shown to brilliant and head as he whispers, “Fag.” I’ll never forget large part for LaBute’s relish of transgres- unsettling effect in a trio of short pieces that . “fag.” That’s all. And brings that can sion. The absence of surface detail in his collectively called “Bash,” which opened down right on the spine of the guy, who just sort of shudders a bit, expelling air. films—“In the Company of Men” takes last week at the Douglas Fairbanks Thea- place in a nameless city and at a nameless tre, starring Calista Flockhart, Ron El- Clearly, LaBute does not follow the corporation where nameless executive dard, and Paul Rudd. Here, in one of Mormon line about the showing of tasks are performed—allows the viewer the pieces—a tandem monologue enti- good. On the contrary, his work is built to focus on the psychological aspects of tled “A Gaggle of Saints: A Remem- on the belief that great good can come the piece: the casual cruelties we commit, brance of Hatred and Longing”—a from showing the bad. the ways in which we displace our anger. soon-to-be-married college couple re- VISITED LaBute on the set of “Nurse I Betty,” which he describes as “a feel- good hit that includes scalping, love, a cross-country car chase, shoot-outs, comedy”—in other words, an entertain- ment, and perhaps a holiday from his usual despair. LaBute, dressed in a blue- and-black plaid shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a slicker with a packet of raisins tucked into the cuff, spent much of the first morning skulking around a crowded Pasadena bungalow, inspecting every cranny of a room where one of the film’s heavies, played by Chris Rock, goes looking for Betty, the title character (Renée Zellweger). The film is essen- tially a chase movie, in which Betty, a waitress, sees her ne’er-do-well husband murdered for the cache of drugs he has hidden in her car; traumatized and de- luded, she sets off for Los Angeles to marry her “fiancé,” the doctor on her fa- vorite soap opera. On the set, LaBute engages his cast as he does the world— with an almost Presidential bonhomie, at once solicitous and standoffish. He speaks with the low-key collegial com- posure of someone who knows who he is—the boss. “Love that Tide!” he called to the set decorator, who was po- sitioning the soap-powder box so that the camera would catch it in the corner of the frame. “Love that box of Tide!” The scene called for the actress Kath- leen Wilhoite to hold a baby as she an- swered the front door; on this bright morning, the professional toddler, a hefty lump called Robert, was bawling himself red in the face. LaBute swooped up the child and cra- dled him in his thick arms, as adept at han- dling kids as adults. (He has an eleven- year-old daughter, Lily, and a seven-year- old son, Spencer.) “You’ll have the baby in your arms. That’ll give you an acting “O.K., so who gets to tell him he’s a war criminal?” challenge,” he said to Wilhoite. “It’ll steal • • the scene,” she said. LaBute shot her a grin as he walked weger, Morgan Freeman), first happy of you,” LaBute said to Rock. Rock away. “They often do,” he said. ending, first film without his own narra- started over toward his screen father, On the bungalow’s front lawn, amid a tive voice.