“The Distance from Here”

            Just about everyone here in London agrees that American Neil LaBute is the most impressive playwright to appear since David Mamet.  LaBute’s new play, The Distance from Here, is premiering at London’s Almeida Theatre and opens in New York later this year, presented by the Manhattan Class Company  as the second in their series of new plays.  The main figure in this shattering tragic-comedy is seventeen-year-old Darrell (Mark Webber), whose aimless life centers upon violence, sex, petty thievery, and manipulation. In the opening scene he and his sidekick Tim (Jason Ritter) taunt the apes at the zoo, while their apparently arrested development suggests that the sign, “Please Do Not Feed the Animals,” might apply equally to simians or homo sapiens.  Not so sure about the sapiens tag.

Shaggy-haired Darrell’s treatment of crew-cut Tim is manipulative, revealing a cruelty masked by concern, egging Tim on to search his private parts when attacked by ants and playfully concealing violence as they spar.  Because they lack vocabulary, their speech is peppered with expletives, and their favorite expression - which betrays both their apathy and their inability to develop thought - is  “whatever.”

            To describe Darrell’s lower-middle-class family as “dysfunctional” is to compliment it.  His young mother Cammie (Amy Ryan) works as a cleaner; her live-in lover Rich (Enrico Colantoni) is employed at a dog-food factory. In their leisure time, in a dingy living-room dominated by a couch, they smoke (constantly), watch television, and engage in sex.(frequently).  Rich, a Stanley Kowalski-type, is having it on with both Cammie and her stepdaughter, Shari (Ana Reeder).  The baby crying incessantly offstage belongs to Shari, who is on welfare. .The baby may be ill, but there is no money to pay a doctor, so they ignore it, regarding it as an annoying object, not a human being:.  ‘Nother hour, I’m not gonna hear shit,” says Cammie, her eyes on the screen as the baby wails

Except for joyless sex, each family member keeps his or her distance; Cammie’s ignoring Darrell as he grew up may be a contributing cause of his adolescent demands for attention. Enraged, he treats as a betrayal his girlfriend’s failure to meet him at the mall where they hang out during school hours at Washington High.  When Tim, who may be hankering for some distance between them, says he cannot join Darrell because of working the night shift at a fast food establishment, Darrell says he will be there to check up. Darrell, asking his mother if she remembers how he made forts on the porch when he was little, is told, “You’re on your own with the Kodak memories and shit.. . .To tell the truth, as an individual, you never made that big an impression.”

            Darrell is determined to make an impression as he increasingly becomes more aggressive, pounding on Rich until they land on the floor, and accusing Tim and girlfriend Jennie of desertion.  Egocentric and amoral, he is maddened to discover that Jennie was sexually involved with another man two years earlier, when she was fifteen.  But he is relieved to learn that the man beat her without having sex : “He hit her?  That’s all he did.  Hit her.”  Even when she tells Darrell she enlisted the man’s help to bring about an abortion when impregnated by Darrell, he persists in his manic revenge, taunting Tim and Jennie and then, despite their frantic efforts to restrain him, destroying the baby.

Meanwhile, the behavior of the others is revealing  When the baby and Darrell disappear, Cammie searches for them until she is exhausted. Shari, the baby’s mother, proposes that she and Rich run off together, and put some distance between them and their seedy milieu: “to do something really different, too, I mean, some kinda thing that nobody’d expect outta us.  You and me.  Maybe add a deck, or a patio.”

If there is no hope for Darrell, there is some for Jennie and Tim.  They desperately try to save the baby while fighting off the crazed Darrell, and afterwards, they keep returning to the freezing pool, into which Tim dives in an attempt to retrieve the body. Having taken off with his mother’s credit card and used Impala, Darrell has not been found.

Tautly directed by David Leveaux and well acted by the ensemble, “The Distance from Here” is a shattering work. LaBute has said that he hopes the audience will continue to think about his plays after the curtain falls.  He has our assurance that this is so with “The Distance from Here.” Among other things, it sheds light on the student murderers at Columbine  And the adult ones at Laramie.

In The Mercy Seat, Neil LaBute focuses on two people on September 12, 2001, the day after the catastrophe at the World Trade Center.  The tragedy brought out the best in many survivors, but Mr. LaBute’s couple are far from heroic   In the midst of destruction in both plays, people go about their everyday lives, their small, self-centered concerns in contrast to the shattering events around them.  Ben (Liev Schreiber) is a guy who takes things as they come, and makes the most of them. l.  He was going to an early meeting at the World Trade Center on 9/ll but stopped off first at the nearby apartment of his mistress Abby (Sigourney Weaver) for a quick one.  Saved from the tragedy and assuming he has been officially numbered among the missing dead, he welcomes the opportunity to “disappear” with his mistress, shed his wife and family, and start a new life out West.

Abby is not so sure she wants to give up her position as head of the section where Ben works.  This leads to a heated argument about their 3-year-relationship with specific details about their lovemaking (with which she is not happy), about their jobs, about his responsibilities to his family, and his ill-thought-out plans for their future.  Except for sex, they do not seem particularly well matched.  She is cutting and quick, ruthless and cool. He is twelve years younger, slower but stubborn.  LaBute’s brilliant dialogue excels in brevity and pinpoint exactness; it is sharp and often humorous, with the two characters revealing themselves entirely through dialogue and movement within the confined space of her upscale apartment.  Here is Ben summing up himself in three sentences:

 “I always take the easy route, do it faster, simpler, you know, whatever it takes to get done, be liked, get by.  That’s me.  Cheated in school. . . took whatever I could get from whomever I could take it from.”

Like LaBute’s pair in the film “In the Company of Men,”  Ben is selfish, his viewpoint still that of a high school adolescent, thinking only of himself, exploiting others for his own satisfaction.  (LaBute’s central character in “The Distance from Here,” premiered recently in London, is actually a high school adolescent, brilliantly drawn.)  Abby is a ruthless woman when it comes to business, where she has worked her way to the top in an important company.  But in their sexual relationship, she has been the submissive one, giving in to his selfishness, possibly through fear of losing him, and believing submission is preferable to loneliness.  LaBute’s titles are often metaphors for the action, this one referring to a religious question the show poses, described by Ms. Weaver as “Are you able to give mercy when it’s denied you?”  The play poses the question but does not answer it.

Subtle and quietly detailed, the outstanding acting by both principals rounds out and humanizes the characters.  Under Mr.LaBute’s impeccable direction, “The Mercy Seat”  is a fascinating study of two people whose hang-ups and hopes are so well demonstrated in the course of an hour and a half that you leave with an insight into human behavior that at the beginning of the play might have been unacceptable.   (Acorn Theater, 410 W. 42 Street, New York, 212-279-4200)