Stamford Theatre Works Production Looks at Love, Manipulation

By Ray Hogan, The Stamford Advocate, Conn.

Mar. 13–’The Shape of Things’

March 13, 2008

Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things” is a boy-meets-girl story. The boy is a museum security guard who catches the girl with a can of spray paint ready to deface a sculpture.

Romance ensues, with the alpha-female Evelyn transforming the nebbish Adam — both are college students — into a more assured and attractive young man.

In his play, which premiered in England and became a motion picture in 2003, LaBute does what he’s become known to do extremely well: portraying people acting horribly.

But beyond the gasp that the final scenes of the play will elicit (rent the film if you want the ending), lies an examination of a larger issue: What constitutes art?

It’s that age-old question that attracted Stamford Theatre Works’ Steve Karp in selecting “The Shapes of Things” as part of STW’s 20th anniversary season. Without giving anything away, let’s just say Evelyn has ulterior motives.

“It’s a fascinating play and the question of what is art is the most fascinating issue,” says Karp, founder and producing director of STW. “The four people, how they interact is fascinating. Human behavior is pushed to the limit.”

The cast agrees. During a recent rehearsal the actors had strong opinions on the play’s outcome. The “What is art?” quandary isn’t easily answered.

“That’s the great question of the play and what makes it one of the great female parts in the canon of modern plays,” says Pepper Binkley, who portrays Evelyn. “The concept itself is challenging and appealing because it is unclear whether she’s valid in any way with what she’s done.”

The playwright and film director, LaBute has built a reputation by examining the worst in human nature with plays and films — sometimes both — such as “In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends and Neighbors.” He does so, he says via e-mail, because it makes better drama.

“We have great capacity for evil and for good as people,” LaBute says. “But my job as a writer is to first cause some conflict and then to figure out what happens after that. I’m not an eternal pessimist although I’m very realistic about how stupid we all can be. I’d rather be hopeful in life and a mess-maker on the page.”

“The Shape of Things,” he says, grew out of wanting to create a predatory female and a thematic idea. As a theater major whose plays pushed major buttons with the faculty at Brigham Young University, LaBute says the play has nothing to do with his own life.

“I didn’t do anything with that idea until I was living in London doing a film and was beginning to notice a rash of conceptual artists making a splash in that city and elsewhere,” LaBute says. “The notion of what is art and what happens when you use yourself, or more importantly, another person in your work became interesting to me. It also fits a certain conception of what writers do pretty well, too!”

The cast for “The Shape of Things” is Binkley, Ari Butler as Adam, Tess Brown as Jenny and Will Poston as Phillip. Jenny and Phillip are Adam’s engaged friends — essentially his only friends — whose lives are also disrupted by the emergence of Evelyn.

“The Shape of Things” begins with four characters familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. “You think you know these characters until you see them unfolding when you realize that they aren’t the stereotypes they’re presented as,” says Binkley.

Says Brown: “I did not see the ending coming at all when I first read the play. The playwright is toying with the stereotypes. You can pull on those (stereotypes) and then he turns it on you.”

“The Shape of Things” begins in the museum with Adam telling Evelyn “you stepped over the line.” As the play progresses, Evelyn will continue to cross societal boundaries.

That’s the point, according to LaBute. “I know men exploit and play with women all the time,” he says. “The very fact that the roles are reversed here might be part of its attraction to actors and audiences.”

“This idea will get under your skin. It’s troubling for an audience,” says director Douglas Moser, who has worked on several Stamford Theatre Works productions, including “A Rosen By Any Other Name” and “The Dining Room.”"You want them to leave arguing about this.”

“Neil often gets equated with the negative characters in his play,” Binkley says. “I firmly believe he’s a moralist. A moral center is a shifting world. That’s our society now.”

Moser says Adam’s final speech in the play could well be the playwright addressing his accusers.

“There’s a wealth that’s never explained,” he says. “How often a Broadway show will let an audience go home completely fulfilled, saying ‘We got that.’ This isn’t that show.”

Several of LaBute’s plays have been made into films, with the playwright serving as director. He still enjoys writing for film and stage and was up for the challenge of becoming a film director after he was established as a playwright. He also has directed “Nurse Betty,”"The Wicker Man” and “Lakeview Terrace,” which is scheduled for release in September. He says directing his own works, with either stage or film actors, allows him to stay true to his original vision.

“That’s the same for on stage as it is in film — the director is given control of a given interpretation of your work (as a writer),” he says. “For me it’s less about control and more about having a vision of how the thing should work in my head that I want to get out. Even if somebody else directs the first production, I often like to go back and direct the play on my own at some point. Again, not because I think I have a ‘better’ idea but because I have my own idea that I want to see fully realized.”

*

what: “The Shape of Things”

when: Today-March 30, Wednesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 4 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. (additional 7 p.m. show March 16); Tuesday, March 18, 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 25, 8 p.m.

where: Stamford Theatre Works, 200 Strawberry Hill Ave.

price: $25-$43

contact: 359-4414 or www.stamfordtheatreworks.org

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