THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Neil LaBute
Chapter 1 & Chapter 2: King's Head Theatre, 116P Upper Street, London N1 1QP, March 9 to 21.
Chapter 3: Greenwich Theatre, Crooms Hill, Greenwich, London, SE10 8ES, March 31 to April 4.
"America The Beautiful." It sounds like it's pregnant with promise, doesn't it? The hairs on the back of your neck patriotically prickle and memories of joining your voice with those of your classmates at school assemblies and 4th of July celebrations at the park next to Main Street are stirred like long undisturbed dust in an attic full of toys and hand-me-downs forgotten since childhood.
It is a phrase that evokes a sense of prelapsarian naivety and a purity of belief in a thing as monolithic as the great romantic myth of America as sign and symbol, to itself and to the world.
And yet.
And yet, here Neil LaBute, that most fearless and funny and often misanthropic of American writers, goes a long way towards delivering a substantial amount of meaning behind that often empty phrase by giving us a collection of vignettes that are portraits of a raw and challenging America that refuses to be defined as a monolith; rather we are given a diverse and challenging mirror into which we glance a palimpsest of human variance that really does signify what can be potentially beautiful about America, without preaching at us or getting didactic.
Here in Chapter 1 we have the monstrous sprawling social hydra that is America tackled from a different angle, with each self-contained roughly 30 minute narrative.
We see LaBute's bizarrely dark sense of humour with a couple planning the perfect murder in Hate Crime, and seeming to get off on it, suggesting both a problematisation of queer identity politics and America's troublingly lustful relationship with violence.
The dark stain of jingoistic American militarism and its deleterious effect on already fragile male fragility in Kandahar.
And an offbeat, funny and unexpectedly stirring romantic swipe at the hegemony of straight America in The Possible.
Like David Lynch, what LaBute offers up is the America just under the surface of the monolithic picket fences and the lily white bubblegum clean image of the mainstream. He digs underneath the surface to find gems of narratives that give us an America that refuses to be caged and defined by any one, all encasing version of any one community. That palimpsest, is what makes America beautiful.
Performances are stunning from all four actors, playing several roles over the entirety of all 9 plays. So far only the first chapter has opened at The King's Head in Islington but notable was Borris Anthony York's deftness as a performer who was easily able to seamlessly navigate first a role as an unfaithful lover conspiring against his fiance and then an Afghan War veteran suffering heart-breaking trauma. Anna María's performance as a charismatic woman who will stop at nothing to get what or who she wants, is a joy to watch with a seething seductive energy perfectly kept under a coy exterior.
Jana Lakatos' modular set perfectly serves to illustrate this very changeable and identifiably fluid America, along with a color scheme that appears to be a distressed and partially bullet ridden and smudgily painted American flag, perfectly conveying the opaqueness of national identity we find ourselves in in 2026.
Never has a more poignant set of stories been so needed to challenge a national conversation that seems so hell bent on achieving that boring, naive monolith and missing what makes America, the beautiful country it could be.
Read The American's interview with Neil LaBute here.
