Neil LaBute is Mamet's Spawn

Reading Speed the Plow by Mamet and Reasons to be Pretty by Neil LaBute, which just had its Broadway opening. LaBute is known to be a brute. He’s obsessed with appearances, especially the power of women’s beauty. The crux of this new play is that a boyfriend says that his girlfriend’s face is “regular” in the course of a garage conversation with his piggish friend who’s coming in his pants over the new “hot” girl in the factory. Their conversation is overheard by the pig’s wife, a very pretty security guard at the factory where the two men work. She calls the girlfriend to apprise her of these developments. All of these events have occurred before the action begins.

Great dialogue. Just great. You can tell he’s influenced heavily by Mamet. The language, the awkwardness that hangs there like Damocles’ sword. It’s so funny, though. LaBute has Greg, the sensitive character who really had no idea his girlfriend would be furious at him and break it off completely because he called her face “regular”, carry around 19th century books (at first Poe, then Hawthorne, then Swift—oops I think he’s 18th century. A Modest Proposal—the Irish starvation problem can be solved by eating their children. Or something like that. I didn’t read it. It’s kind of like a prop, or even product placement, to signify hey LaBute’s men have changed—his new man reads the classics! It makes him thoughtful and sensitive to the pregnant security guard whose piggish husband is indeed getting it on with the creamy skinned twenty year old factory girl. Jesus, if I knew that reading the classics would have increased my sensitivity, I would have read only savagery.

There’s something appealing though about these male writers (particularly some of Mamet): his delirious honesty and language that bites through bone. Joe Mantegna, yeah! Watching him as the con man in House of Games, you know he’s talking bullshit, that no one would talk like that, but you can’t stop listening. You’re as seduced as Lindsay Crouse, the psychiatrist. This guy really does know human nature and we believe him. And that’s his power. We believe him and he can do what he wants with that belief.