"This Is How It Goes" at Profiles Theater on 2/10/08 in Chicago

Profiles Theater is doing a season of all Neil LaBute plays. For those of us who like the combination of the head on look at the brutality of contemporary society, his humor, and his dialogue, this was a treat. Lest season, Profiles production of "Fat Pig" was unflinching and excellently done.

The Profiles space is teeny. Its stage is really just a small floor and there are seats on either side. The two front rows are probably two feet from the action at times. As an audience member, it would be easy to notice the entrances and exits of the actors and the audience members sitting across from you. Because of the acting in Profiles' plays, this intimacy is used to good effect and we're largely able to ignore those things. I went to see "This Is How It Goes" on a night when it was below zero and the theater got unbearably cold when an actor opened the door to the theater when making an entrance. I wondered once or twice about how cold the actors, who were wearing shorts in some scenes, must have been, but mostly I was too caught up in the action of the play to worry for them too much.

This play is about a threesome -- a funny, sensitive, somewhat nerdy but cute enough white man; the pretty, exhausted, emotionally dissatisfied white woman with whom he'd been infatuated as a teen; and, a successful, good-looking, athletic black man who is her husband. At the play's opening, we learn that the somewhat nerdy guy is a layer who has come back to town after have been away for many years and is no longer practicing law. He runs into Belinda at the mall and we can see that he's thrilled to see her because he's always been in love with here. His attention, lightness, and humor are a welcome relief from her marriage to Cody. They begin to see each other more frequently and, as she gets more and more of his attention, the disfunctions in her marriage to Cody come increasingly to the surface. At first, the tension in the play is that her marriage is unravelling but eventually we learn why the lawyer has quit his job and come back to his hometown. He has made a very inappropriate racial joke within hearing distance of a black colleague and refuses to apologize. The scene in which he tells this story is classic LaBute. In it we get a thoughtful analysis of racial relationships in America. The lawyer's racism is evident -- his joke, which he maintains is just a joke, betrays racist attitudes underlying the joke. It's especially brutal for audiences because we see ourselves in that joke. Told by a nice man, a character we like very much, we recognize the brutality of the joke and the attitude it reflects, one that we like to think only lives in rednecks in America but that really lives in the hearts and minds of white collar people in America's cities as well. Meanwhile, our long history of race relations makes it impossible for the black woman to hear it as a joke. The result of that history is that she can only hear it as an attack. I won't give anymore details about the play's plot except to say that, in the end, the racism is not the final issue in the play but the relationship between the two men who are fighting for Belinda. Eventually, we realize that Belinda is something that the men feel they can trade. The eventual lesson of the play is that relationships in America are still among men and women are commodities they trade.

LaBute's plays are brutal but I think it is a mistake to say that he must be a brutal person. Instead, I think he's a keen observer of contemporary American culture and his plays reflect the brutality of our lives back to us. His play and the subsequent film, "In the Company of Men," was a scathing reflection of misogyny in American culture. It hits us hard because we would all like to believe that sexism is dead in America, at least in educated spaces, and we are reminded that it's not. "This Is How It Goes" points out things about race in America that many of us think have disappeared but that are still around and lurking under the surface and come up for air in jokes. A look at gender relationships does the same thing. But I think this view is not one that LaBute has made up out of his imagination but instead out of his observations of American culture.

This production is very well acted and well directed. It was very funny. And the intimacy of the theater, despite the cold let in by the entrances and exits, served the play well.