BASH: LATTERDAY PLAYS
By Neil LaBute. Directed by Jeffrey Mousseau. Set design by Amanda Wager. Costumes by Kristin Glans. Sound by J. Hagenbuckle. Lighting by John Malinowski. With Scott Barrow, Laura Latreille, and Bill Mootos. Presented by Coyote Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, Thursday through Sunday through May 5.

In the three staged confessions that make up Neil LaBute’s Bash, characters reveal their most horrendous acts to unseen interlocutors. Relating their crimes, they behave as they would in an ordinary social context and converse in something uncannily like contemporary American vernacular. This strange fusion of the monstrous and the normal is the central idea of the trilogy, and the Coyote Theatre’s production shows how well it can work.

In A Gaggle of Saints, two Boston College students in evening dress recount a trip to New York for a “bash” at the Plaza Hotel that ends in a different kind of bash, the beating-to-death of a gay man. The couple direct their interlocked parallel monologues to an off-stage person who is unidentified and unreal.

Iphigenia in Orem is more realistically framed, the narrator, a Utah businessman, having apparently cornered a stranger in a hotel lobby at a convention for the purpose of talking his ear off. But the listener’s apparent failure to interrupt, question, or shrink from the narrator’s account of infanticide contradicts the sense that the scene is taking place in the real world, shifting it to abstract memory space. Only in Medea Redux is the off-stage confessor plausibly characterized — as a journalist researching a murder for which the narrator (who was seduced by a teacher at age 13 and got pregnant) has already been convicted.

These fluctuations in the speaker-listener relationship are LaBute’s vehicle for social criticism. The basher in Gaggle counts on his listener to understand how the satisfied smiles of two middle-aged homosexuals could drive him to murder. The businessman in Iphigenia also counts on the sympathy of his listener, though he has some compunction about his crime — which is why it takes him so long to work up to it in his time-shifting narrative. The mother in Medea Redux is alone here in not expecting her listener to condone her crime.

The writing is, at its best, hard and superficial, and each play is constructed so that the revelation of horror comes at the end of a series of banal, awful, sometimes funny details. The characterization is minutely indexed: the narrators in two of the plays are Mormons, and references to Mormon culture provide much of the texture. The backstory of downsizing and office politics in Iphigenia adds another dimension of familiarity. As in LaBute’s films In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, the author wants us to admire his Mamet-like “ear” for a stylized naturalism of speech.

Bash is a showcase for tour de force acting, and that’s what Coyote Theatre delivers. In A Gaggle of Saints, Scott Barrow and Laura Latreille make an interesting study in contrasts: her Sue is graceful, composed, knowing, sometimes severe, whereas his John about to explode from the strain of a lifelong effort at being ingratiating and optimistic. Side by side the pair give the impression some real-life couples produce, of an overgrown child and an indulgent mother who’s used to looking the other way. In Iphigenia in Orem, Bill Mootos starts out breezy and accommodating, then grows intimate and somber. Mootos emphasizes the undertones of aggressiveness in the character, making weapons out of his self-conscious clichés and his solicitude about his listener’s comfort.

Acting honors for the evening go to Latreille, who returns in Medea Redux. This play is the darkest and richest of the three, and she brings warmth to the stark staging and lighting. With mannerisms of contact (nodding while saying, “You probably knew that, right?”), eerie tics (blinking hard, swallowing in stages, abstractedly grazing her earlobe), and unobtrusive cigarette moves, Latreille gives a precise, broken quality to the monologue. She suggests someone who’s too familiar with the role of victim to bother playing it anymore, and she presents the finished-image quality of a person living only through her relationship with the past.

Director Jeffrey Mousseau deserves credit for guiding the performances and for a solid production concept. Amanda Wager’s simple stage design involves placing a tin wall at different angles to the proscenium for each of the three acts; the blocking is, with a single exception, just a matter of deciding where the actors will sit to deliver their monologues. But Mousseau changes LaBute’s order for the monologues. The author’s script follows Iphigenia with A Gaggle of Saints and then Medea Redux. Leading with Gaggle and closing with Medea, as Mousseau does, makes for a gradual progression in the level of self-knowledge possessed by the characters, and that gives LaBute’s bleakness a firm moral shape.

Issue Date: April 26-May 3, 2001