LaBute was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Marian, a hospital receptionist, and Richard LaBute, a long-haul truck driver.[2][3] LaBute is of French Canadian, English, and Irish ancestry,[3] and was raised in Spokane, Washington. He studied theater at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). At BYU, he also met actor Aaron Eckhart, who would later play leading roles in several of his films. He produced a number of plays that pushed the envelope of what was acceptable at the conservative religious university, some of which were shut down after their premieres. However, he also was honored as one of the "most promising undergraduate playwrights" at the BYU theater department's annual awards.[4] Labute did graduate work at the University of Kansas,[5]New York University,[5] and the Royal Academy of London,[citation needed] and he participated in a writing workshop at London's Royal Court Theatre.[5]
Career
Early career and success
LaBute burst onto the theater scene in 1989 with his controversial debut Filthy Talk for Troubled Times.[6] His interest in the film industry came with a viewing of The Soft Skin (La Peau Douce 1964), said the director to Robert K. Elder in a 2011 interview for The Film That Changed My Life.[7]
It exposed me, probably in the earliest way, to "Hey, I could do that." I've never been one to love the camera or even to be as drawn to it as I am to the human aspect of it, and I think it was a film that speaks in a very simple way of here's a way that you can tell a story on film in human terms. It was the kind of film that made me go, "I could do this; I want to tell stories that are like this and told in this way." And so it was altering for me in that way, in its simplicity or deceptive simplicity.[8]
In the Company of Men portrays two businessmen (one played by Eckhart) cruelly plotting to romance and emotionally destroy a deaf woman. His next film Your Friends & Neighbors (1998), with an ensemble cast including Eckhart and Ben Stiller, earned an R-rating for its portrayal of the sex lives of three yuppie couples in the big city.
His play Bash: Latter-Day Plays is a set of three short plays (Iphigenia in Orem, A Gaggle of Saints, and Medea Redux) depicting essentially good Latter-day Saints doing disturbing and violent things.[9] It ran Off-Broadway at the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre in 1999. Medea Redux is a one-person performance by Calista Flockhart.[5][9][10] This play resulted in his being disfellowshipped from the LDS Church (i.e., losing some privileges of church membership without being excommunicated). He has since formally left the LDS Church.[11]
Early 21st century
In 2001, LaBute wrote and directed the play The Shape of Things, which premièred in London, featuring film actors Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz. It was turned into a film in 2003 with the same cast and director. Set in a small university town in the American Midwest, it focuses on four young students who become emotionally and romantically involved with each other, questioning the nature of art and the lengths to which people will go for love. Weisz's character manipulates Rudd's character into changing everything about himself and discarding his friends in order to become more attractive to her. She even pretends to fall in love with him, prompting an offer of marriage, whereupon she cruelly exposes and humiliates him before an audience, announcing that he has simply been an "art project" for her MFAthesis.
In 2001, LaBute and producer Gail Mutrux founded the Pretty Pictures firm, with a first-look deal at USA Films.[12]
LaBute's 2002 play The Mercy Seat was a theatrical response to the September 11, 2001, attacks.[13][14] Set on September 12, it concerns a man who worked at the World Trade Center but was away from the office during the infamous 2001 terrorist attack – with his mistress. Expecting that his family believes that he was killed in the towers' collapse, he contemplates using the tragedy to run away and start a new life with his lover. Starring Liev Schreiber and Sigourney Weaver, the play was a commercial and critical success.[15] While hesitant to term The Mercy Seat "political theater", Labute said, "I refer to this play in the printed introduction as a kind of emotional terrorism that we wage on those we profess to love." He dedicated this edition to David Hare, in response to Hare's "straightforward, thoughtful, probing work".[16]
In 2010, LaBute directed Death at a Funeral, a remake of a 2007 British film of the same name. It was written by Dean Craig (who also wrote the original screenplay) and starred Chris Rock. Throughout the decade, various productions of his existing works were mounted as he continued to produce new material. He wrote new scenes and an introduction for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare which ran from April 7 to June 6, 2010. LaBute framed the classic play in overtly metatheatrical terms, adding a lesbian romance subplot. His short play, The Unimaginable, premiered as part of the Terror 2010 season at the Southwark Playhouse in London, October 12–31, 2010.
LaBute's first produced play, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times (1989), which was a series of biting exchanges between two "everyman" characters in a bar, was staged from June 3–5, 2010, by MCC Theater as a benefit for MCC's Playwrights' Coalition and their commitment to developing new work. LaBute also directed the reading. Originally when it premiered in New York City at the Westside Dance Project, "[legend] has it ... that one unimpressed member of the audience shouted: "Kill the playwright!"" [19]
The Break of Noon premiered Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in an MCC Theater production on October 28, 2010 (previews), running to December 22, 2010.[20] The play then opened in 2011 in Los Angeles at the Geffen Theater, again directed by Jo Bonney, with January 25 preview and opening on February 2. It ran through March 6. It featured Tracee Chimo, David Duchovny, John Earl Jelks, and Amanda Peet.[21]
LaBute took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six Books, for which he wrote a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible.[22] In 2012, he joined the Chicago-based storefront theatre company, Profiles Theatre as a Resident Artist.[23]The Way We Get By opened Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre on May 19, 2015, starring Amanda Seyfried and Thomas Sadoski, with direction by Leigh Silverman.[24]
The LaBute New Theater Festival is a festival of world premiere one-act plays that is produced by William Roth[25] and St. Louis Actors' Studio each summer at their Gaslight Theater[26] and each winter at 59E59 street theaters in New York.[27] In 2013, Some Girl(s) was directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, with the screenplay adapted by Labute's from his 2005 play. In an interview with Screen Comment's Sam Weisberg, he said: "I have had a lot of people direct my material for the theater, but I haven't had anyone do my work on film. I was excited by what would be brought to it. It was great to have someone else in there that you could trust visually and intellectually and emotionally to make something that was respectful of the material but also creative."[28]
In August 2016, the Utah Shakespeare Festival produced a preview of LaBute's play How to Fight Loneliness in Cedar City, Utah, and announced its intention to stage the play during its 2017 summer season.[29] In February 2018, MCC Theater terminated its relationship with him ending his place as their playwright-in-residence and their plans to produce his next play Reasons to Be Pretty Happy in the summer. Blake West, MCC Theater's executive director, said, “We’re committed to creating and maintaining a respectful and professional work environment for everyone we work with.”[30] In September 2018, it was announced that Netflix had given order for the production of the science fiction miniseries The I-Land. LaBute is credited as the showrunner and executive producer of the miniseries.[31] The miniseries premiered on September 12, 2019.[32]
Critical response
Critics have responded to his plays as having a misanthropic tone.[33][34][35] Rob Weinert-Kendt in The Village Voice referred to LaBute as "American theater's reigning misanthrope".[36]The New York Times said that critics labeled him a misanthrope on the release of his film Your Friends & Neighbors because of the film's strong misanthropic plot and characters.[37] Britain's Independent newspaper in May 2008 dubbed him "America's misanthrope par excellence".[38] Citing the misanthropic tone of the plot in the films In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors and The Shape of Things, film critic Daniel Kimmel identified a pattern running through LaBute's work of being that the unlikeable, main antagonists of those three films end up getting away with their lying, scheming and mis-deeds, coming out on top of all the other characters as the real winners of those stories by quoting: "Neil LaBute is a misanthrope who assumes that only callous and evil people, who use and abuse others, can survive in this world." Critics labeled him a misogynist after the release of In the Company of Men.[37]
LaBute became a Fellow of the International Association of Theatre Leaders (IATL)[41] in 2023.
Style
LaBute's style is very language-oriented. His work is terse, rhythmic, and highly colloquial. His style bears similarity to one of his favorite playwrights, David Mamet. LaBute even shares some similar themes with Mamet including gender relations, political correctness, and masculinity.[42]
^Elder, Robert K. (January 1, 2011). The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark. Chicago Review Press. ISBN978-1556528255.
^LaBute, Neil. Interview by Robert K. Elder. The Film That Changed My Life. By Robert K. Elder. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011. N. p2.48. Print.
