LaBute's "The Shape of Things'

At a museum, a knockout art student Evelyn (Bethany Ditnes) meets dorky Adam (Bob Stineman), where he works part-time while studying at the same small-town California college. She flirts with him aggressively and, despite her superior dating market value, surprises him by agreeing to a date. And then immediately starts making him over.

As their relationship intensifies over the course of four months, Adam readily complies with every upgrade Evelyn suggests. He trades his glasses for contacts, drops 25 pounds through diet and exercise, buys designer clothes, styles his hair differently, gets a tattoo of Evelyn's initials, even undergoes plastic surgery to shave extra cartilage from his nose. With each improvement, his inner nature changes, rendering him more aggressive and confident but also more deceitful. Gradually, Adam's duplicitous character wrecks the relationships among everyone he knows.

Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things purports to offer us a new take on a familiar literary theme: a man or woman trying to change in order to deserve someone else's love. It's a familiar theme in my life as well: I've tried to change every girl I've ever dated. But LaBute adds little to the theme, other than the shock of exquisite viciousness.

Socrates and Henry Higgins did it too

Yes, the deceitful manipulation of others is immoral. But in Shaw's Pygmalion, Henry Higgins whips Eliza Doolittle into shape on a bet. What else is new? LaBute paints the surface of his play with big themes that he barely explores, naming his two lovers Adam and Eve, and only trumping his long-winded discussions of art vs. shock value with sophomoric moralizing when Adam exclaims, "You're two inches away from making babies into lampshades!"

Really? The impulse to create another person in one's own image is a universal stratagem in the war of the sexes, as a glance through any lifestyle magazine will attest. It goes back at least to Socrates, who made a similar case when he argued, in The Symposium, that true love is an older man trying to impregnate a younger lover with his own ideas.

When Adam says that he hates working out, Evelyn replies in typical spoiled-brat fashion, "You shouldn't do something you don't want to do." His gallant response: "You should, if it's for someone" [you care about]. There lies the moral crux of this play— a crux LaBute neglects to explore.

Director's bad choices

Director Ed Renninger compounds this problem with bad choices that hamper the talent and the telling. While Ditnes is passably flirty and seductive as Evelyn, she appears too girly and aggressive (seducing Adam should take little more than a smile; instead she's gropes him like a cougar). Popping her gum dilutes her steel will, and her singsong voice drains the gravity from her performance.

As Adam, Stineman fares little better; his more confident posture and assertive speech signify changes that he simultaneously fails to convey with an undertone of loss or regret for who he was.

Only three scenes convey either the seriousness or the tension, and the video interludes add little besides showing us what the performances should have made evident. But I doubt that better direction could have intensified these issues further.

If she'd whipped me into shape…

A playwright of LaBute's stature would better serve an audience by examining the impractical assumptions that lie beneath anyone taking offense at Evelyn's actions, such as those who insist that instead of changing, Adam should just wait for some nice girl to come along and love him for who he is. The only thing that strikes me as lazier is the equally gross, and complementary notion of unconditional love, which degrades genuine adoration and respect into a bandage for dirty sores. Evelyn's striving to improve Adam's faults strikes me as far more moral than her demanding (or giving) unconditional love. The only thing wrong with Evelyn's Adam-improvement project is her hidden sinister motive.

As she rightly observes in the penultimate scene, "If I had done this out of love, every woman in the audience would be asking me for advice." I can't disagree. If a gorgeous girl like Evelyn had whipped me into shape in my early 20s, even if only as a joke, I'd probably be a better man today.