Lovely Head and Other Plays Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE PLAYS OF NEIL LABUTE

  REASONS TO BE PRETTY

  “Mr. LaBute is writing some of the freshest and most illuminating American dialogue to be heard anywhere these days … reasons flows with the compelling naturalness of overheard conversation.… It’s never easy to say what you mean, or to know what you mean to begin with. With a delicacy that belies its crude vocabulary, reasons to be pretty celebrates the everyday heroism in the struggle to find out.”

  —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

  “[T]here is no doubt that LaBute knows how to hold an audience.… LaBute proves just as interesting writing about human decency as when he is writing about the darker urgings of the human heart.”

  —Charles Spencer, Telegraph

  “[F]unny, daring, thought-provoking …”

  —Sarah Hemming, Financial Times

  IN A DARK DARK HOUSE

  “Refreshingly reminds us … that [LaBute’s] talents go beyond glibly vicious storytelling and extend into thoughtful analyses of a world rotten with original sin.”

  —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

  “LaBute takes us to shadowy places we don’t like to talk about, sometimes even to think about …”

  —Erin McClam, Newsday

  WRECKS

  “Superb and subversive … A masterly attempt to shed light on the ways in which we manufacture our own darkness. It offers us the kind of illumination that Tom Stoppard has called ‘what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.’”

  —John Lahr, The New Yorker

  “[Wrecks is a] tasty morsel of a play … The profound empathy that has always informed LaBute’s work, even at its most stringent, is expressed more directly and urgently than ever here.”

  —Elysa Gardner, USA Today

  “Wrecks is bound to be identified by its shock value. But it must also be cherished for the moment-by-moment pleasure of its masterly portraiture. There is not an extraneous syllable in LaBute’s enormously moving love story.”

  —Linda Winer, Newsday

  FAT PIG

  “The most emotionally engaging and unsettling of Mr. LaBute’s plays since bash … A serious step forward for a playwright who has always been most comfortable with judgmental distance.”

  —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

  “One of Neil LaBute’s subtler efforts … Demonstrates a warmth and compassion for its characters missing in many of LaBute’s previous works [and] balances black humor and social commentary in a … beautifully written, hilarious … dissection of how societal pressures affect relationships [that] is astute and up-to-the-minute relevant.”

  —Frank Scheck, New York Post

  THE MERCY SEAT

  “Though set in the cold, gray light of morning in a downtown loft with inescapable views of the vacuum left by the twin towers, The Mercy Seat really occurs in one of those feverish nights of the soul in which men and women lock in vicious sexual combat, as in Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

  —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

  “[A] powerful drama … LaBute shows a true master’s hand in gliding us amid the shoals and reefs of a mined relationship.”

  —Donald Lyons, New York Post

  THE SHAPE OF THINGS

  “LaBute … continues to probe the fascinating dark side of individualism … [His] great gift is to live in and to chronicle that murky area of not-knowing, which mankind spends much of its waking life denying.”

  —John Lahr, The New Yorker

  “LaBute is the first dramatist since David Mamet and Sam Shepard—since Edward Albee, actually—to mix sympathy and savagery, pathos and power.”

  —Donald Lyons, New York Post

  “Shape … is LaBute’s thesis on extreme feminine wiles, as well as a disquisition on how far an artist … can go in the name of art … Like a chiropractor of the soul, LaBute is looking for realignment, listening for a crack.”

  —John Istel, Elle

  BASH

  “The three stories in bash are correspondingly all, in different ways, about the power instinct, about the animalistic urge for control. In rendering these narratives, Mr. LaBute shows not only a merciless ear for contemporary speech but also a poet’s sense of recurring, slyly graduated imagery … darkly engrossing.”

  —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

  NEIL LABUTE is an award-winning playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter. His plays include: bash, The Shape of Things, The Distance From Here, The Mercy Seat, Fat Pig (Olivier Award nominated for Best Comedy), Some Girl(s), reasons to be pretty (Tony Award nominated for Best Play), In A Forest, Dark and Deep, a new adaptation of Miss Julie, and Reasons to be Happy. He is also the author of Seconds of Pleasure, a collection of short fiction.

  Neil LaBute’s films include In the Company of Men (New York Critics’ Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmaker Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival), Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things, Lakeview Terrace, Death at a Funeral, and Some Velvet Morning.

  ALSO BY NEIL LABUTE

  FICTION

  Seconds of Pleasure: Stories

  SCREENPLAYS

  In the Company of Men

  Your Friends and Neighbors

  PLAYS

  bash: three plays

  The Mercy Seat

  The Distance From Here

  The Shape of Things

  Fat Pig

  Autobahn

  This Is How It Goes

  Some Girl(s)

  Wrecks and Other Plays

  In a Dark Dark House

  reasons to be pretty

  Filthy Talk for Troubled Times and Other Plays

  The Break of Noon

  Reasons to be Happy

  Miss Julie: A New Adaptation

  Copyright

  CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that all materials in this book, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. The stock and amateur performance rights in the English language throughout the United States, and its territories and possessions, Canada, and the Open Market are controlled by the Gersh Agency, 41 Madison Avenue, 33rd Floor, New York, New York, 10010. No professional or nonprofessional performances of the plays herein (excluding first-class professional performance) maybe given without obtaining in advance the written permission of the Gersh Agency and paying the requisite fee. Inquiries concerning all other rights should be addressed to the Gersh Agency.

  First published in paperback in the United States in 2013 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  NEW YORK

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the above address.

  Copyright © 2013 by Neil LaBute

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, o
r broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0847-1

  for my man godfrey

  “Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest

  a bud yet guarantee a flower.”

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the plays of Neil LaBute

  About the Author

  Also by Neil LaBute

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  LOVELY HEAD

  THE GREAT WAR

  IN THE BEGINNING

  THE WAGER

  A GUY WALKS INTO A BAR

  STRANGE FRUIT

  OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS

  BAD GIRL

  THE PONY OF LOVE

  * * *

  PREFACE

  * * *

  How nice to be back in print.

  It’s been a few years now since I’ve had a volume of collected plays appear on bookshelves—and I’m very happy to note that there are still shelves to appear on (at the time of my writing this preface, anyway). Not “virtual” shelves or as a part of an “app” you can download but actual wooden or metal shelves with actual paper books sitting on those shelves. What a lovely feeling and one that periodically threatens to disappear from our lives.

  Some people just won’t miss books if they go—I’m sure of that for a fact. They’re not like Nazis, exactly (they probably don’t burn books in their spare time) but they’re close enough for my taste. They don’t like the bother of books: the weight, the size, the smell, the little stacks that gather in the corners of rooms. I love all of that. I live to crack open an old paperback on the street that someone is selling and to breathe in the musk of those pages or to find a forgotten receipt or an inscription or a leaf pressed within the pages. That’s wonderful. Occasionally I’ll get lucky and find a newspaper clipping from long ago or, better yet, a hand-written or typed note that was saved at some chapter heading and then forgotten—probably a simple book marker that now becomes a gateway to the past in my own hands.

  I love books; to write them, to own them, to give and receive them. They are one of the great joys of living as far as I’m concerned. Don’t get me wrong, I like watching old re-runs of The Wild, Wild West and eating bad pizza as well, but books are one of the great treasures of my life. My mom introduced me to the pleasures of reading at an early age and I never came back. When I was a kid, going to the public library was almost as good as going to the A & W drive-in or to the movies. Maybe even better. The downtown library in Spokane, Washington, felt so vast and overpowering—I would probably laugh to see its paltry size now as an adult—but even my local branch was a literal world of wonder. We even had book-mobiles in my day. Amazing that those are creatures of the past already and I still feel like a young man (even though I no longer am).

  I hope that you—whoever you are—if you’re holding this book in your hands and reading this introduction, feel a kindred spirit with books and literature and the pure sense of escape and magic that comes from launching into a world that you know nothing about. If you’re an actor and you bring these words to life in class or on a stage, I salute you in a special way because you are brave souls. Being an actor is such a gift and a curse—we love you for it and we judge you for it but most of us just can’t do it, no matter how easy you make it look. I, for one, appreciate the pain and euphoria you experience out there under the lights and I will always work to provide you with worthy and worthwhile material. Hopefully you will find some of that enclosed here in this compilation of short works.

  Lovely Head, the one-act that lends its name to this volume, was written with an actor in mind but also came about because of a happy encounter I had with a fellow playwright named Marco Calvani. Marco is based in Italy but we met while doing workshops in Barcelona for Sala Beckett, a wonderful fringe theater in that fair city. Marco and I admired each other’s work and spoke one day about how rarely we are asked to direct another playwright’s work, mostly (I hope) because we are known for writing and directing our own material. Out of that conversation was born a project called AdA (Author directing Author) in which I wrote a play for him to direct and he did the same for me. Lovely Head was that play and his was called Things of This World, and we subsequently worked on them in Spoleto, Italy, thanks to the hard-working folks at La MaMa Umbria (headed by the indefatigable Mia Yoo) and a terrific group of actors from MIXO (Marco’s company in Rome), along with the incredible Urbano Barberini and the exquisite Andrea Ferreol. After finishing at the Spoleto Festival, we subsequently staged both pieces at the Fringe Festival in Madrid and in New York City at the Ellen Stewart Theater (back at La MaMa’s home base). In NYC I got to work with the collective brilliant acting minds of Craig Bierko, Gia Crovatin, Larry Pine and Estelle Parsons and I felt that old rush of putting up a show quickly and dangerously, but with the kind of actors that really make you stop and pinch yourself in rehearsal because they’re so damn good. AdA was a really special experience and the kind of thing I believe you need to do as a long-time competitor in these theatrical sweepstakes known as a “career”: no matter how it all turns out, you need to keep trying new things.

  I should also say that the title of this play was too clever for me to have come up with it on my own—my thanks goes to the members of the musical group called Goldfrapp, whose song I ripped it off from. It was meant as a tribute to their great and ethereal work (go listen to Felt Mountain if you haven’t heard it already).

  All of these other plays have either made their debut or at least played at some venue in New York City (with the exception of Over the River and Through the Woods, which will make its New York debut later this year). A few started on the West Coast, one as a short film and two of them, as you will see, are monologues (one of them first performed by the actress Alice Eve and the other one first performed by this author—I’ll leave it to you to sort out which one is which).

  All of them were fun to write, to work on and/or to watch in performance. I’ve been so lucky to constantly have great actors to elevate my material up on stage. I hope this trend continues forever—believe me, you know the difference when you see it.

  A quick word about the play Strange Fruit, which was written for a show called Standing On Ceremony and was a collection of short plays defending gay marriage. I was asked by a gifted producer named Joan Stein (who passed away just last year) if I would be interested in writing something and my automatic answer was “yes.” I’m always interested in the theater, whatever the venue, whatever the time and whatever the reason. I love it. That said, I did it as much for her as anything; we had worked together years ago on the play bash in Los Angeles and since then I had know her as a lover of life and a crusader for theater and basic human rights. Joan was the real deal, a person who looked you straight in the eye and told you the truth. She will be missed.

  Thank you—whomever you are—for reading this, for putting up with me and for continuing to read or perform or despise or love or dismiss or praise my work. Thank you for coming back and trying it once again—I feel the same way you do about me: “sometimes he’s good, sometimes he’s bad, but at least the guy keeps swinging for the fences.” I hope that all of you in this profession, from onlooker to critic to artist, keep doing that very same thing.

  Neil LaBute

  January 2013

  LOVELY HEAD

  Lovely Head had its American premiere at La MaMa in New York City in September 2012. It was directed by Marco Calvani.

  MAN Larry Pine

  GIRL Gia Crovatin

  Silence. Darkness.

  Lights up on a living room—nice but it has an antiseptic feel to it somehow, as if the whole thing is a rental or something. It isn’t, but it has that look.

  MAN seated on a couch, staring at a television. Some kind of noise coming out of it, probably an infomercial. Maybe sports.

  After a moment, he gets up and looks out
the window, then glances at his watch. Tries to sit again but goes to make a water with ice in the adjoining kitchen. As he does it, the doorbell rings and he spills the drink.

  MAN … coming! I’m coming!!

  He quickly grabs a roll of paper towels and pulls off a long piece, trying to mop up the mess. He ends up in a tangle and shakes it off. He moves the sopping pile into the sink and wipes his hands, moving toward the door at a trot. He side-steps and turns off the TV and snaps on the stereo. He checks himself in a mirror and goes to the door. Stops, takes a couple deep breaths, then opens it.

  A GIRL stands near the threshold, looking off. She is a dazzler—gorgeous hair, shortish skirt, heels. Sunglasses cover her eyes. Like Lolita working for Avon.

  She turns slowly and looks at him, then saunters past.

  The MAN steps aside to let her in, then waves to someone outside before closing the door behind himself. A moment between them.

  GIRL … took you long enough.

  MAN Sorry, I was … sorry.

  GIRL It’s your money.

  MAN No, I know that, I realize that it’s … anyway, forgive me. (Beat.) … I spilled something.

  GIRL I get that a lot.

  MAN Really?

  GIRL No, it’s a joke. Don’t ya get it?

  MAN Ummmmmmm … no, actually. I don’t.

  GIRL Forget it.

  MAN No, please, I’d … what’re you saying? I just didn’t follow … your …

  GIRL Guys. Spilling stuff. On me. (Beat.) Does that help?

  MAN Oh. (Gets it.) Ohhhhhhh, right … got it.

  GIRL Good.

  MAN I get it now. Yes.

  GIRL Great.

  MAN That’s … very candid. As always.

  GIRL Yep.

  MAN Quite funny, really. That’s a good one …

  GIRL Uh-huh. (Beat.) So?

  MAN Right! So, so, so. Should we … do you wanna sit, or …?

  GIRL Up to you.

  MAN Let’s sit. I’d like that. Yes. (Beat.) We usually sit, so we should … ummmm …

  GIRL Ok, then. Let’s sit.

  The MAN indicates the couch and they move over to sit on it. GIRL checks her own watch. Pushes her glasses up onto her forehead.

  MAN Can I get you anything?