All the Ways to Say I Love You
PRAISE FOR THE PLAYS OF NEIL LABUTE
ALL THE WAYS TO SAY I LOVE YOU
“Compelling … a bleak vision redolent of classical tragedy.”
—Max McGuinness, Financial Times
“LaBute’s hour-long monologue is haunting … To say more is to spoil his perfect ending.”
—David Finkle, The Huffington Post
“A creeping primal darkness ensnares us in what appears to be an ordinary life.”
—Linda Winer, Newday
“Beware of any mentions of Reasons to be Happy in Neil LaBute’s dark new play … a wrenching solo monologue … unsettling to the haunting, heartrending end.”
—Jennifer Farrar, The Associated Press
“A densely plotted sonata … a portrait of a woman reckoning, without apology or deflection, with a decision that has defined her life.”
—Jason Fitzgerald, The Village Voice
THE WAY WE GET BY
“It’s sexy, it’s starry … dangerously irresistible.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“The Way We Get By has an unexpected sweetness, along with a twist.”
—Jennifer Farrar, The Associated Press
“The Way We Get By feels like a refreshingly sunnier and more hopeful LaBute, with moments that feel suspiciously like giddy joy.”
—Sara Vilkomerson, Entertainment Weekly
“Viscerally romantic, almost shockingly sensitive, even, dare we say it, sweet … LaBute … dares here to explore less obviously explosive territory. Yet, somehow, this daring feels deep.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
THE MONEY SHOT
“A wickedly funny new comedy.”
—Jennifer Farrar, The Associated Press
“An acid-tongued showbiz satire.”
—Scott Foundas, Variety
“Fresh, joyously impolite … a good and mean little farce.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
“100 minutes of rapid-fire bursts of raucous laughter.”
—Michael Dale, BroadwayWorld
“Packs a stunning amount of intelligence into 100 minutes of delectable idiocy.”
—Hayley Levitt, TheaterMania
“Consistently entertaining … To his credit, LaBute does not aim for the obvious metaphor: in showbiz, everyone gets screwed. He is more concerned with amusing us.”
—Brendan Lemon, Financial Times
REASONS TO BE HAPPY
“Mr. LaBute is more relaxed as a playwright than he’s ever been. He is clearly having a good time revisiting old friends … you’re likely to feel the same way … the most winning romantic comedy of the summer, replete with love talk, LaBute-style, which isn’t so far from hate talk …”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“These working-class characters are in fine, foul-mouthed voice, thanks to the scribe’s astonishing command of the sharp side of the mother tongue. But this time the women stand up for themselves and give as good as they get.”
—Marilyn Stasio, Variety
“LaBute has a keen ear for conversational dialogue in all its profane, funny and inelegant glory.”
—Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
“LaBute … nails the bad faith, the grasping at straws, the defensive barbs that mark a tasty brawl.”
—Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post
“Intense, funny, and touching … In following up with the lives of his earlier characters, LaBute presents another compassionate examination of the ways people struggle to connect and try to find happiness.”
—Jennifer Farrar, The Associated Press
“Terrifically entertaining.”
—Philip Boroff, Bloomberg
“A triumph … always electric with life. LaBute has a terrific way of demonstrating that even in their direst spoken punches … fighting lovers are hilarious. … completely convincing.”
—David Finkle, Huffington Post
REASONS TO BE PRETTY
“Mr. LaBute is writing some of the freshest and most illuminating American dialogue to be heard anywhere these days … Reasons flows with the compelling naturalness of overheard conversation. … It’s never easy to say what you mean, or to know what you mean to begin with. With a delicacy that belies its crude vocabulary, Reasons to be Pretty celebrates the everyday heroism in the struggle to find out.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“There is no doubt that LaBute knows how to hold an audience. … LaBute proves just as interesting writing about human decency as when he is writing about the darker urgings of the human heart.”
—Charles Spencer, Telegraph
“Funny, daring, thought-provoking …”
—Sarah Hemming, Financial Times
IN A DARK DARK HOUSE
“Refreshingly reminds us … that [LaBute’s] talents go beyond glibly vicious storytelling and extend into thoughtful analyses of a world rotten with original sin.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“LaBute takes us to shadowy places we don’t like to talk about, sometimes even to think about …”
—Erin McClam, Newsday
WRECKS
“Superb and subversive … A masterly attempt to shed light on the ways in which we manufacture our own darkness. It offers us the kind of illumination that Tom Stoppard has called ‘what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.’”
—John Lahr, The New Yorker
“A tasty morsel of a play … The profound empathy that has always informed LaBute’s work, even at its most stringent, is expressed more directly and urgently than ever here.”
—Elysa Gardner, USA Today
“Wrecks is bound to be identified by its shock value. But it must also be cherished for the moment-by-moment pleasure of its masterly portraiture. There is not an extraneous syllable in LaBute’s enormously moving love story.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
FAT PIG
“The most emotionally engaging and unsettling of Mr. LaBute’s plays since bash … A serious step forward for a playwright who has always been most comfortable with judgmental distance.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“One of Neil LaBute’s subtler efforts … Demonstrates a warmth and compassion for its characters missing in many of LaBute’s previous works [and] balances black humor and social commentary in a … beautifully written, hilarious … dissection of how societal pressures affect relationships [that] is astute and up-to-the-minute relevant.”
—Frank Scheck, New York Post
THE DISTANCE FROM HERE
“LaBute gets inside the emptiness of American culture, the masquerade, and the evil of neglect. The Distance From Here, it seems to me, is a new title to be added to the short list of important contemporary plays.”
—John Lahr, The New Yorker
THE MERCY SEAT
“Though set in the cold, gray light of morning in a downtown loft with inescapable views of the vacuum left by the twin towers, The Mercy Seat really occurs in one of those feverish nights of the soul in which men and women lock in vicious sexual combat, as in Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“A powerful drama … LaBute shows a true master’s hand in gliding us amid the shoals and reefs of a mined relationship.”
—Donald Lyons, New York Post
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
“LaBute … continues to probe the fascinating dark side of individualism … [His] great gift is to live in and to chronicle that murky area of not-knowing, which mankind spends much of its waking life denying.”
—John Lahr, The New Yorker
“LaBute is the first dramatist since David Mamet and Sam Shepard—since Edward Albee, actually—to mix sympathy and savagery, pathos and power.”
—Donald Lyons, New York Post
“Shape … is LaBute’s thesis on extreme feminine wiles, as well as a disquisition on how far an artist … can go in the name of art … Like a chiropractor of the soul, LaBute is looking for realignment, listening for a crack.”
—John Istel, Elle
BASH
“The three stories in bash are correspondingly all, in different ways, about the power instinct, about the animalistic urge for control. In rendering these narratives, Mr. LaBute shows not only a merciless ear for contemporary speech but also a poet’s sense of recurring, slyly graduated imagery … darkly engrossing.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
NEIL LABUTE is an award-winning playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter. His plays include: bash, The Shape of Things, The Distance From Here, The Mercy Seat, Fat Pig (Olivier Award nominated for Best Comedy), Some Girl(s), Reasons to be Pretty (Tony Award nominated for Best Play), In a Forest, Dark and Deep, a new adaptation of Miss Julie, and Reasons to be Happy. He is also the author of Seconds of Pleasure, a collection of short fiction, and a 2013 recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Neil LaBute’s film and television work includes In the Company of Men (New York Critics’ Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmaker Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival), Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things, Lakeview Terrace, Death at a Funeral, Some Velvet Morning, Ten x Ten, Dirty Weekend, Full Circle, Billy & Billie, and Van Helsing.
ALSO BY NEIL LABUTE
FICTION
Seconds of Pleasure: Stories
SCREENPLAYS
In the Company of Men
Your Friends and Neighbors
ADAPTATIONS
Miss Julie
Woyzeck
PLAYS
bash: three plays
The Mercy Seat
The Distance From Here
The Shape of Things
Fat Pig
Autobahn
This Is How It Goes
Some Girl(s)
Wrecks and Other Plays
In a Dark Dark House
Reasons to be Pretty
Filthy Talk for Troubled Times and Other Plays
The Break of Noon
Lovely Head and Other Plays
Reasons to be Happy
In a Forest, Dark and Deep
Some Velvet Morning
Things We Said Today: Short Plays and Monologues
The Money Shot
The Way We Get By
Exhibit ‘A’
Copyright
CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that all plays in this book, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. The stock and amateur performance rights in the English language throughout the United States, and its territories and possessions, Canada, and the Open Market are controlled by the Gersh Agency, 41 Madison Avenue, 33rd Floor, New York, New York, 10010. No professional or nonprofessional performances of the plays herein (excluding first-class professional performance) maybe given without obtaining in advance the written permission of the Gersh Agency and paying the requisite fee. Inquiries concerning all other rights should be addressed to the Gersh Agency.
This edition first published in the United States in 2016 by
Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
NEW YORK:
141 Wooster Street
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For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],
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LONDON:
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For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],
or write to us at the address above.
Copyright © 2016 by Neil LaBute
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-1652-0
for judith and leigh
“i have everything, yet have nothing …”
—jean racine
CONTENTS
PRAISE FOR THE PLAYS OF NEIL LABUTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY NEIL LABUTE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PREFACE
ALL THE WAYS TO SAY I LOVE YOU
ALL MY WHITE SINS FORGIVEN
WITH HAIR OF HAND-SPUN GOLD
PREFACE
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
So goes the shortest of short stories attributed to Ernest Hemingway (though, like much of his life, there is contention as to whether this too is truth or fiction). I don’t really care. I love that someone wrote it and I like to believe it was Hemingway. He sounds like the type of author who could write it—the man behind so much lean and muscular prose—and just the kind of person who would bet his fellow writers at Luchow’s or the Algonquin that he could “write a complete novel in just six words” and then do so in such bravura fashion (fully collecting his earnings at the end of the wager as well, no doubt).
More importantly—and don’t tell Mr. Hemingway this—I love the words and the story and how I feel every time I tell that tale or someone tells it to me. I get the chills and the hairs on my arms stand at attention. Those six words are beautifully chosen and shaped and assembled into a complete cavalcade of woe. I feel them as a person, I love them as an artist and I agonize over them as a father.
As a writer, I envy the shit out of them and the person who created them (just in case it was Ms. Dorothy Parker instead of Mr. Hemingway, as previously reported).
That’s actually one of the best feelings in the world when you’re a writer. “Envy.” Loving a piece of work by someone else so much that you wish that you had written it. It’s not a bad thing. For me, to have written Machinal instead of Sophie Treadwell or All My Sons instead of Arthur Miller or Disgrace instead of J.M. Coetzee or The Secret History instead of Donna Tartt would be a wonderful thing and I envy each and every word that those authors wrote instead of me. In a good way. In a healthy way that says “thank you for being so damn great and for setting the bar so damn high and for taking me to places with your writing that I still need to go in my own.” It’s nice to have heroes—in both your real and your literary life—and I don’t see anything wrong with a little healthy competition.
If you can impress me in just six words, even better.
I have written at some length about how much I value the short literary form in playwriting but I could just as easily go on about my love of the short story. I recently read through a volume of Shirley Jackson’s best work and was taken aback at how gorgeous and bone-chilling her stories could be. Beautiful words, assembled into little collages of pain and regret. Run out and grab a collection if you can, if you love reading or writing or simply get off on hearing about misfortune in regard to other people. You will be thankful that the collective fates of her protagonists have not fallen on your slender shoulders, believe you me (and I don’t mean just the particularly gruesome one that befalls poor Mrs. Hutchinson in “The Lottery,” probably the most well-known of Ms. Jackson’s work).
The volume that you now have in front of you is a strange little beast. It contains two short plays and the short story that inspired those two dramatic works. My editor and I thought that by bringing these three literary forms together (prose, monologue, and playlet), one might get a clearer picture of their individual and collective creation and get some small glimpse into how an idea can grow and shift and turn back on itself as it is birthed by a writer.
“With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold” was a commissioned work for a collection of new fairy tales; I got involved thanks to the wonderful writer Kate Bernheimer and my offering to My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (great title) was a modern re-telling of “Rumplestiltskin.” Ever the outsider, I told the story from the perspective of the troublesome Mr. Rumplestiltskin and in a first-person form. To my knowledge it’s never been performed as a monologue but it certainly could be. In it, a young man talks about his relationship with a teacher and the kinds of joy and misery that come from this cursed and calculated union. By the time I decided to write a one-woman show loosely based on the myth of Phaedra, I doubled back and used the same ideas that had led me to my fairy tale, but this time from the perspective of the teacher in question.
All The Ways To Say I Love You is a full-on monologue that gives us the story of an older woman and a younger man completely from the side of the woman. She recounts their history (and the history of her life with her husband) as she finishes up her day at high school. She is also a counselor to these students and we see her putting away their files and writing notes to herself while explaining to us how she began and ended an illicit affair with a young man and to what purpose (and that purpose may be even darker than you think).
Because there’s always a purpose to things.