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Title: Bash: 3 Plays by Neil Labute ISBN: 1-58567-024-3 Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "Latterday Greek Tragedies"
Comment: Labute in these three vignettes is remarkably daring, but in ways that in critical discussion are generally ignored. His negativity or "depressing," non-cheery outlook is all that's usually singled out. What is missed is the continuity he establishes between seemingly "cool," emotionally minimalist, postmodern Americans and those anarchic passions of vengefulness, monstrous ambition, and macho rage which motivated the characters in Greek tragedies.
The necessary adjustments being made,the murderous Medea comes back to life in the first of these short pieces, and the equivalent of the daughter-sacrificing Agamennon does the same in the second. The third, perhaps the most shocking of all, features a mad Ajax-like murderer filled with macho rage who's hidden under the sweet-faced normality of the boy next door. Unlike the safe, conventional "American Beauty," whose gay basher was an over-the-top, stereotypical Marine, in "Bash" Labute really does "push the envelope" by making his violent homophobe an otherwise nice,comely, seemingly ideal young Mormon.
Each week, new plays appear which are described in the papers as truly provocative, daring pieces which challenge stale convention. Most of them, however, are only meant to challenge viewers in some mythical Midwest hick town while complacently reasserting the shared assumptions of with-it audiences in the big cities. Labute, on the other hand, actually calls such procedures into question, writing works which really are subversive of complacency. It's no wonder he's currently undervalued.
Rating: 5
Summary: Important Play
Comment: I have had the opportunity to direct this play twice in the past two years (once it was just one of the three plays), and I just can't say enough about how powerful it is. Critics of Labute say he is a mental rapist who is too dark. Read the newspapers and read this play and you will see that this isn't fiction. Like much great theatre it comments on our society and gives us pause. The characters and their situations are memorable, and Labute is a talented, tight writer.
Rating: 5
Summary: Still Shaken
Comment: I saw this play last night and am eagerly awaiting it to be in stock again so I can buy it. Like some other reviewers here, I too am struggling for adjectives: brilliant is the best that I can do. It's written almost tenderly-- there is no contempt for these characters although what they do does not merit our love-- and it's written incredibly honestly. It's not at all sentimental, and you will step away from it shaken. Step into this world where celebration and violence are blurred as well as the title promises.
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Title: The Shape of Things by Neil Labute ISBN: 0571212468 Publisher: Faber & Faber Pub. Date: 15 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Mercy Seat by Neil Labute ISBN: 0571211380 Publisher: Faber & Faber Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Distance from Here by Neil Labute ISBN: 1585673714 Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Three Days of Rain: The American Plan; The Author's Voice; Hurrah at Last by Richard Greenberg ISBN: 0802136362 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz ISBN: 1559362324 Publisher: Theatre Communications Group Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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