LaBute vs. Durang at the Fringe Festival

LaBute vs. Durang:
Tough targets vs. easy ones

JIM RUTTER

The Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that every author creates the history of his influences. Nowhere is this more apparent in this year’s Fringe Festival than in a pair of productions whose writers—Neil LaBute and Christopher Durang—borrow their characters and plots wholesale from the works of other playwrights while infusing the stories of others with their own distinctive styles.

In Bash: Latter Day Plays, Neil LaBute presents three monologues of American Mormon life that draw upon classical Greek tragedies—and LaBute’s bookends of “Iphigenia at Orem” and “Medea Redux” clearly stake claim to their source material. The middle section of this sequence— “A Gaggle of Saints”—gives the trilogy its name, as a tale about both a party and a gay bashing.

Anyone who knows the three stories can see where LaBute wants to take the audience, and only “Gaggle of Saints” leaves doubt about his source material (Trojan Wars? The Bacchae?). However, the four actors and director Aaron Oster render the journey both compelling and illuminating.

The brutality of everyday life

“Medea Redux” opens on Charlotte Northeast in an orange prison jumpsuit, a tape recorder bearing witness to a tale of sexual abuse by a schoolteacher that produces a pregnancy. As I said, if you know the Greek story, you know her child’s eventual fate. But as dreary a tale as “Medea Redux” presents, Northeast peppers her performance with moments of excitability that are nearly magical.

The Greek dramatists wove their plots to show the punishing morality of a well-ordered universe that always sought to restore a balance in human affairs. But LaBute crafts his play to reveal the brutality lying in wait beneath the surface of everyday life.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Iphigenia at Orem”: In an age of corporate downsizing, a mid-level manager (Damon Bonetti) sacrifices his own infant daughter to generate enough sympathy to keep his job. Here, Bonetti’s initial surface-level sympathy devolves into a vicious artifice; coloring his performance with subtle nervousness, he offers a glimpse of the hideousness that lies dormant in every human heart.

Tennessee Williams gets the treatment, again

Though it’s similar in the manner of adaptation, A Streetcar Named Durang: Two Burlesques and a Nightmare finds playwright Durang turning the tragedies (and tragi-comedies) of 20th-Century writers (especially his favorite target, Tennessee Williams) into an evening of pure hilarity. The three one-acts spoof everyone from Noel Coward to Samuel Beckett to David Mamet not to mention a bit of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as well.

Chris Fluck as Stanley Kowalski hysterically intersperses monologues from Glengarry Glen Ross in between shouts of “Stella,” while the wide-eyed and absent-minded Tina Brock as Blanche DuBois yearns for a life of magic and poetry from a census taker (after the newspaper boy, pastry chef, and other local workers have already moved into her household). In “A Stye of the Eye,” Durang’s parody of Sam Shepherd’s heavy-handed symbolism, two blind women attempt to fold the American flag while repeating, “We’re blind and we’re folding the American flag,” as another actress crashes a pair of cymbals together at the side of the stage. Frenetically paced by directors Tina Brock and Gerre Garrett, the evening flies by.

But Durang is pretentious, too

Both LaBute and Durang display a sheer cleverness for adaptation and mastery of their respective genres. But when Durang started to pick on a playwright whose work I do enjoy (Coward), I found myself thinking, “Who does this guy think he is?” Beckett might indeed be pretentious and overrated. But Durang himself has never written a sincere word in his entire life.

It’s always easy to spoof easy targets: See A Streetcar Named Desire often enough, and you’ll invariably find yourself giggling when you shouldn’t. But any attempt to update Greek tragedy to modern life presents no small challenge. In all three of LaBute’s monologues, I appreciated how he could portray the persistence of universal stories while ultimately modifying them to fit modern customs, not to mention modern psychological justifications for atrocities.

“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors,” Borges also wrote. LaBute succeeds brilliantly in showing us characters, not much different from ourselves, who in critical moments of great stress show us a side of humanity that resurfaces throughout all of human history. Durang, Shepherd and even Beckett would be lucky to achieve the same.