September 25 2002

RELATIONSHIPS, IF not exactly works of art, are at least collaborative efforts in mutual definition. But it's unsettling when the flow of influence is all in one direction – particularly when it's the premise of a Neil LaBute play. Controversial in the film and theater worlds since the potent 1997 indie In the Company of Men, LaBute continues his fascination with manipulation and control in The Shape of Things, making its West Coast debut in a sleek production at the Aurora Theatre.

The story takes place at a Midwestern college where undergraduate Adam (Craig Marker) works as a security guard for the art gallery. There he encounters Evelyn (Stephanie Gularte), a tough, trendy, and beautiful grad student in the art department, hovering provocatively before a sculpture, just beyond the normally authoritative velvet rope, spray can in hand. Adam is the classic dweeb, an English major with pretensions of being a writer but dumpy, unfashionable, and hopelessly shy. In a reversal of the misogynistic dynamic of In the Company of Men, as well as the biblical relationship echoed in their names, Evelyn will remake the smitten Adam in her own image, sculpting him like a piece of clay into the ideal mate. This happens much to the amusement, wonder, and growing concern of Adam's best friends, Philip (Danny Wolohan) and Jenny (Arwen Anderson), Philip's fiancée. Thus, a Pygmalion in reverse, to paraphrase the bookish Adam; or, as the TV-reared Evelyn might put it: Friends meets Night Gallery.

LaBute, seemingly obsessed with betrayal, is a seductive stylist, though the conceit here becomes increasingly brittle – more abstract and less realistic – as it nears its logical conclusion. Still, there's a definite satisfaction in following it through. LaBute seems to fill all of his work with victims (or potential victims) turned perpetrators to protect themselves. The supreme irony here rests on the fact that Evelyn, a portrait of the artist as young manipulator, uses art as a shield from experience, whereas Adam, her objet d'art, retains the capacity for feeling and, therefore, for growth.

If ultimately less provocative than some of LaBute's past work, the play remains intriguing, not least for its consistently sharp and witty dialogue – a strength director Tom Ross and cast exploit fully with four fearless and supple performances – and Jim Cave's exquisite lighting, which lends a colorful and captivating visual style to the proceedings, as if the characters have been folded into the pages of a glossy modern arts magazine.

In the 'House'

John Guare's seminal success with House of Blue Leaves (1971) had much to do with an inspired young talent and everything to do with context: namely, a raging war in Vietnam and the attendant frustrations of the free world's consummate consumer society. And as Berkeley Repertory Theatre's revival of Guare's sardonic farce shrewdly demonstrates, for all its built-in nostalgia, this '60s period piece retains a remarkably contemporary charge.

The action takes place in 1965, the day the pope came to New York to plead before the United Nations for an end to the war. In a cluttered Queens apartment, patriarch, zookeeper, and hokey tunesmith Artie Shaughnessy (Jarion Monroe) longs to escape his deranged wife, Bananas (Rebecca Wisocky), and flee to Hollywood with bit of fluff Bunny Flingus (Jeri Lynn Cohen). Despite the encouragement of his loquacious muse, Artie still has a maddening flicker of affection for Bananas, whose panic attacks have him regularly forcing pills down her throat as if she were one of the animals he tends. Meanwhile 18-year-old son Ronnie (Adam Ludwig) is AWOL from the Army with a bomb and a plan to blow up the pontiff.

The pope's arrival signals a moment of promise, of dreams to be fulfilled. But it's all a comic cheat. We already sense that promises will be left empty. A relatively static first act gives way to an explosive second thanks to Ronnie, evocatively garbed in altar-boy surplice and Army fatigues. A surreptitiously deaf actress (Susannah Schulman), a gaggle of surly nuns, an M.P., and Hollywood director and family-friend Billy (Bill Geisslinger) all make appearances in a hilarious series of disasters and derailments. The final scene, a somewhat forced representation of mercy amid this hopeless mayhem, lays to rest any lingering doubts about earthly salvation.

In Guare's America the narcissistic love of a ruthless individualism, symbolized by the obsession of all – except, significantly, Bananas – with fame, meets its counterpart in a despicable foreign war that Ronnie inadvertently brings home. Director Barbara Damashek and a remarkable cast go a long way toward infusing it all with a palpitating immediacy. Context does the rest.