Lovely Head and Other Plays

LaBute Neil

Description

The title play, which had its American premiere at La MaMa in 2012, rivetingly explores the relationship between a nervous older man and a glib young prostitute, as their evening together drives toward a startling conclusion. Also included is the one-act play The Great War, which looks at a divorcing couple and the ground they need to cross to reach their own end of hostilities; In the Beginning, which was written as a response to the Occupy movement and produced around the world in 2012-13 as part of Theatre Uncut; The Wager, the stage version of the film Double or Nothing starring Adam Brody; the two-handers A Guy Walks Into a Bar, Over the River and Through the Woods, and Strange Fruit; and two powerful new monologues, Bad Girl and The Pony of Love.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468308471
• Langue: English

Extrait

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.
N EW Y ORK 141 Wooster Street New York, NY 10012 www.overlookpress.com For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail] , 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, or 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. S COTT F ITZGERALD
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 abou