America the Beautiful: Chapter 1 review
Volley of short plays by American writer Neil LaBute is a predictably mixed bag of violence masquerading as social commentary
At a polarising time in the US comes the first of three ‘chapters’ of short plays by one of its most polarising playwrights, Neil LaBute. These mini trilogies are making their UK debut, directed by James Haddrell as part of the new producing arm of Greenwich Theatre, which will stage the last chapter after the King’s Head has hosted the first two.
These opening three plays are loosely collated around one of LaBute’s favoured themes: the destructiveness of relationships. In Hate Crime, two men having an affair with each other plot a brutal death; in Kandahar, a soldier who has fought in Afghanistan testifies to why he murdered his wife after coming home; and in The Possible, a bisexual woman adopts unlikely measures to win the love of a seemingly straight woman with a boyfriend.
The overarching title of these three chapters is drawn from Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A Ward’s famously patriotic 19th-century song of the same name. But if you’re expecting some truly coruscating satire about the psychological state of modern America, think again. As with much of LaBute’s work, shock value too often takes the wearily lazy shortcut of just describing violence, set against Jana Lakatos’s grimly grey set – flag-echoing streaks of red smeared across breeze blocks like blood stains, with stars as bullet holes.
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For the most part, Haddrell elicits some strong performances from the cast across the three plays. Borris Anthony York, in particular, is impressively versatile as he swings between coyly flirtatious in Hate Crime, as he plots to kill his soon-to-be husband for his life insurance, and wire-taut and ready to explode in Kandahar. But the latter is just a numbingly ugly play, built on a sense of male rage that doesn’t say anything meaningfully new about war or misogyny.
Hate Crime does the same thing, but is more effective by being more clever about it – using the noirish trappings of its set-up to drive a core of dark humour through its story of internalised homophobia. Its characters dare each other to say the unsayable as violence and financial gain substitute love. There’s still a fundamental hollowness to the writing. But its pitch-black cynicism rings some notes.
The Possible is the best of the bunch, mainly because it doesn’t default to stabbing or maiming as its plot device. It works, at times, actually as an amusing parody of a certain type of self-expression and sexual individualism of our age, as one character seeks to liberate another out of “labels” and “convention” by sleeping with her boyfriend. At the same time, the play leaves some space for us to question how much we sleepwalk through the choices we make in our lives.
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