Neil LaBute on ‘How to Fight Loneliness’ and exploring the grey areas in a black and white world
Death might not be the most enticing of subjects to write about, but playwright and filmmaker Neil LaBute has never stuck to easy territory. His play, How to Fight Loneliness, will open at London’s Park Theatre on April 22nd, and it touches on one of the trickiest topics of them all – terminal illness. The plot revolves around three people, one of whom is facing death, and the others are facing the prospect of losing a person they love from very different perspectives.
“I tend not to be a theme person, so it wasn’t like I thought, ‘Oh, I should write about death,'” LaBute says in an interview over Zoom. When he started writing the play, he was going through a death in his family and became acutely aware of the struggle that loved ones go through when they can’t do anything to help a dying family member. “Dramatically,” he says, “It felt like a good place to have someone talk for two hours about those feelings and then come up with a story that worked itself around those elements.”
LaBute has been writing about tricky relationships for more than three decades and, as a result, has often been labelled as a provocateur. His breakout play was 1993’s In the Company of Men, which he adapted into a film of the same name in 1997. Made in two weeks on a budget of $25,000, the movie tells the story of two male office drones who, bristling over their sense of powerlessness, decide to find a woman with low self-esteem to date and then mercilessly discard. They choose a deaf colleague and follow through with their scheme to devastating ends.
The film won the Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival and, in retrospect, was decades ahead of its time. Toxic masculinity had yet to become a ubiquitous term, and the #MeToo movement was two decades away. The fact that it didn’t have a happy ending or punish its main characters might have rubbed some viewers the wrong way, but that lack of a comfortable resolution is the reason it still feels so prescient. It presents a dark, twisted relationship between two men and a woman, and allows the audience to dissect the moral connotations. It’s the kind of film that starts conversations, not the kind that finishes them
LaBute’s ability to delve deep into the pitch-black heart of cruelty and gender dynamics pervades his work. In 2001, his play The Shape of Things premiered in London with Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz in the lead roles. It follows a woman who manipulates her insecure partner into falling in love with her, all while using him as a case study for her MFA thesis. More recently, he wrote The Answer to Everything, a play about a group of women who make a pact to exact vengeance on the men who wronged them. At the height of the #MeToo movement, LaBute says he found it difficult to get the play produced in the US.
“It was hard to get people to even read it,” he says. “And a couple of directors that I really admired looked at it and seemed interested. But the idea that one of those characters, one of those women, had lied about the person that she was talking about, it was an immediate ‘No.'”
As someone who has always thought of himself as an apolitical writer, this response seemed to miss the mark. “That’s a pretty political reaction to a dramatic work,” he says. “I mean, I guess you could say that, ‘Well, it’s a political play.’ I didn’t think of it as that so much as I’m always trying to look at the human side of things.”
Faced with rejection in the US, LaBute decided to take the play to Europe. “I’m very, kind of straightforward and simple about that,” he says, “I’m like, ‘Well, if it’s not you, then it’s going to be somebody else.'” It premiered in Germany in the end and earned excellent reviews, even from American critics. The New York Times noted that, despite the reviewer’s initial wariness, the play took its female protagonists seriously and did not offer a shred of pity or defence for its male characters.
Times have changed since LaBute burst onto the scene with In the Company of Men. He may not see himself as a political playwright, but everything is political, and in the US, especially, everything is polarised. You’re either passionately for something or vehemently against it. Debates are just arguments, and nuance has given way to battle stations.
“That’s a hard place to work from dramatically,” he says, “Because I think the grey areas are some of the most interesting – and certainly, some of the more interesting characters to write, someone who contains, you know, Whitman’s multitudes.”
All of this ties into a very sober understanding of the entertainment landscape. In a world where people can stream countless movies and TV shows from home, LaBute is acutely aware that as a playwright, he’s fighting an uphill battle. If people do decide to put down the money for a theatre ticket and leave the comfort of their homes for a night out, he better give them something that’s worth their effort, something that gets them thinking and talking long after the curtain goes down. “You know, that’s sort of the contract we make with each other,” he says.
Ultimately, though, the theatre is where he feels the most ownership of his work. As a filmmaker, he’s had plenty of experience dealing with the many-headed monster of the studio system, most notably with his ill-fated 2006 remake of The Wicker Man.
“There’s a kind of unspoken thing in the theatre that people weirdly do follow,” he says. “Mostly, if the playwright is alive, they can’t really change something without asking, whereas if they buy your screenplay at a studio, you know, it’s amazing how much they can change it without even including you in the process.” With that in mind, he’s looking forward to the London premiere of How to Fight Loneliness. “If you don’t like any of it, it’s pretty much mine,” he says.
