Superego-Size Me
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One afternoon, businessman Tom shares a lunch table with plus-sized Helen, and a mutually satisfying romance begins. Yet what the cafeteria has joined together, Tom’s mocking coworkers wish to pull asunder. Will he stick it out?
If I told you the play was written by Neil LaBute, you could guess the answer. And, having been told that, you probably wouldn’t care to try. He has spent the last decade filling stages and screens with depictions of male foul ness. Some of these were real achievements, like the film “In the Company of Men” and the unnerving one-acts “Bash.” His recent work has disappointed, but it’s still very good to be Neil LaBute. People know his name. Fancy movie stars want to work with him. His efforts are metronomically embraced by The New Yorker, where he is placed in the pantheon of dramatic moralists somewhere between Aeschylus and Jesus Christ.
“Fat Pig,” which opened last night at the Lucille Lortel, is the latest sign that this particular emperor wears very little. It begins with a spicy premise and laconically works it out. There’s no great invention here, no real depth of character. As in his last few plays, Mr. LaBute seems to find his creations a lot more shocking than the rest of us do. We didn’t need “The Mercy Seat” to grasp that selfishness flourished in the wake of September 11, nor did “The Distance from Here” crack open any new understanding of young suburban annihilation.
More than once, the play reminded me of the subversively brilliant “Seinfeld” in which Jerry, courting a Native American woman, finds himself tripping over all sorts of phrases that would give offense, like dinner reservations and ticket scalper. Weight issues create a similar minefield, as soft forms of prejudice continue to thrive. Society tolerates a kind of bigotry towards overweight people that you won’t find today in race, sex, or religion. Yet the swollen American waistline is a public health crisis, and a national embarrassment.
In the hands of the right dramatist, that friction could yield a powerful play. Mr. LaBute is not that dramatist, and doesn’t want to be. He explores darkness within souls, not within societies. After meeting Helen (Ashlie Atkinson), Tom (Jeremy Piven) returns to the office, where he is accosted by his friend/tormentor Carter (Andrew McCarthy). When Carter finds a picture of Helen and sends it via e-mail to the entire office, he is playing out the LaBute Principle: Thuggish male behavior increases exponentially as distance from a water cooler decreases.
Helen takes special abuse from Tom’s officemate Jeannie (Keri Russell), who attacks with the fury of a 12-year-old with hairspray in her eyes. But Mr. LaBute undercuts his own drama by making Jeannie Tom’s ex-girlfriend. The vengeful Jeannie would call Helen a pig (and worse) if she were merely stocky. Casting also causes some problems here. Mr. LaBute asks us to believe that characters played by Keri Russell and Jeremy Piven are in something like a stalker-stalkee relationship – and she’s the stalker. Even before Jeannie turns up at the company beach party (don’t ask) in an agreeably skimpy red bikini, the relationship turns the play into magic realism.
Jo Bonney has proven herself a major talent over the last few scenes, especially in her staging of “Living Out” for Second Stage. But for MCC, she can’t do much with Mr. LaBute’s script and a cast of under equipped movie personalities. (To judge by their biographies, only Ms. Atkinson is more a creature of stage than screen.) Their individual talents notwithstanding, none of the four actors can hold the stage. Mr. Piven and Ms. Atkinson in particular seem content to let the dialogue ooze along, not projecting any energy over the footlights, generally behaving as if somebody will clean it up in post-production. It could be that Mr. LaBute, like most of his actors, belongs on screen, or at least elsewhere than here.
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What are the sins of Eurotrash theater? Willful obscurity, over-the-top stagecraft, auteur-ish egocentrism. You will find all of these amply represented this week at the BAM Harvey, where Jan Lauwers presents his theater/dance work “Isabella’s Room.” The fact that the show still captivates has to be regarded as some kind of early Christmas miracle.
Two years ago, Mr. Lauwers’s father died, leaving him a remarkable collection of antiquities. Various masks, sculptures, and ancient bric-a-brac (petrified whale penis, anyone?) strew the stage. With his Brussels-based troupe Needcompany, Mr. Lauwers used these objects to create the story of Isabella, a blind 94-year-old woman who lived a remarkable 20th-century life.
The show tells her story in more or less linear fashion, but don’t go looking for dramatic convention. Mr. Lauwers values energy above sense, impulse above form. While one or two characters are speaking or singing, the rest may be idly dancing around the edges of the stage. The night has an ad hoc vibe, as if the performers just did whatever came to mind.
Mr. Lauwers begins by introducing the company and whom they play. That seems a little self-celebratory, even for a European auteur, but it’s not as if he’s going to spend the entire show visible onstage in a white suit. Actually he does spend the entire show visible onstage in a white suit. I don’t know why he thought this wise – he doesn’t do much beyond dance a little, adjust a sound level now and then, and generally eye the audience – but it doesn’t hurt. One of the mesmerizing things about the show is that you can’t guess what it might do next.
The group movements tend to resemble a talent show at Bellevue: the freaked-out contortions, the silly, decadent screaming. But Mr. Lauwers has found a strong center in Viviane De Muynck. In her severe blond hair and dark mirror shades, she plays Isabella with humor and gusto. She is lithe for a substantially built woman, with a massive, delicate voice.
For a visual-minded continental, Mr. Lauwers is an unusually strong writer. (One artifact, Isabella muses, might have caught the tears of Cleopatra herself.) That still doesn’t explain why this show works in spite of its many calamities. But it does, it does. The last few minutes prove suddenly moving. Mr. Lauwers pays a lovely, unexpected tribute to his father. And in the midst of the most flagrant illusions, he creates a feeling of concreteness: As the company sings “We just go on, and on, and on,” it takes no effort at all to imagine Isabella living another century yet.