PLAY: "In a Dark Dark House"

"Nothing like a couple of fag jokes to break the ice," says Drew as he keeps his distance from his estranged brother, Terry. It's a good way to introduce Neil LaBute, too: the sort of playwright who uses honesty as a weapon and politically incorrect humor as a shield. His latest play, In a Dark Dark House, isn't about "fag jokes," or even the supposed childhood molestation of Drew by Terry's father figure. It's about the ties that bind us. Underneath all of the whip-smart language and the nuances of tone, the play is absurdly physical, and its strength comes from the breeze of a putt on a mini-golf course or the swift ferocity of a bear hug. These moments shows LaBute's growth as a writer (perhaps in relation to his recent work as a film director): no longer do his delightfully wicked characters simply hurl insults at each other between bantering sessions (the splendid The Shape of Things) or inflict empty cruelties (Fat Pig). It's still LaBute, but a more ambiguous LaBute, one who has finally added insinuation to his arsenal.

LaBute's detractors question his predictable unpredictability: every play has a cruel, moral twist at the end, like M. Night Shyamalan directing the Saw franchise. Whether it's the misdirection of In a Dark Dark House or the darkness of Drew's stakes-raising confession, the surprise here is still surprising, most notably in how the actors handle it. Ron Livingston is so convincing as Drew--the smug, lawyerly asshole--that his tight-lipped explosions of anger and his throat-clenching tears allow us to see him as a victim. In fact, he makes his brother seem like the bad guy, especially with the force Frederick Weller brings to the role of Terry, a man so aggressive that even Drew's use of the word "Dude" draws one fist back. Of course, there's a twist in expectations already, for Drew's actually a manipulative liar, right down to the fake laugh, and Terry's a straight-shooting realist who doesn't buy into bullshit. Weller, despite his tendency to be typecast as the antihero (Take Me Out, Seascape), is fantastic in this role, from his narrow posture to his harsh mid-West accent.

The second scene is vintage LaBute: an unbalanced seduction scene between a minx of a sixteen-year-old, and a playful, charming Terry. LaBute's always been a little misogynistic, and he writes very little character into Jennifer: he objectifies her while at the same time making her equally culpable in the crime. It's no surprise that he nicknames her with the masculine "Buddy," although it's refreshing to see Lousia Krause retain such tenuous sexiness in the role. Buddy is a demonstration of LaBute's strength as a writer (natural, if not too true-to-life characters) and weakness (the same limited troupe of characters are in all of his plays). At least LaBute knows to cast movie stars: charisma overwhelms stereotype.

The one thing that's not helping LaBute is director Carolyn Cantor. Not that Cantor's a bad director--she brought Adam Rapp's twisted world to life in Essential Self-Defense--but she encourages LaBute's worst habits. What should be subtle moments have a spotlight thrust upon them by Cantor's staging, and the very last "dangling" image is a bit too tell-tale. She uses the multilevel grass and bright blue sky well to parallel the picturesque facade with the underlying rot, and her props--a windmill golf obstacle whose blades don't cover the hole, an oversize swing--elicit the desired comic effect. LaBute's words are always funny, even with "that dark cloud going on"; Cantor's staging is dulled by the moments of tragedy.

In a Dark Dark House happens to be another success for Neil LaBute: the topics are fresh, the characters are lively, and the twist still works. Molestation isn't as understandable as adultery (The Mercy Seat) or image (Fat Pig) but Frederick Weller's rough-edged Terry is a polarizing first for LaBute: an antihero, sure, but a deep one.

PLAY: "Horizon"

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Playwrights who come right out and proclaim their play to be allegory are setting the bar rather high. Rinde Eckert's Horizon often hits the mark with panoramic observations on religion (based loosely on the philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr). At the same time, the vista of parables is so large that the endless devices are as confusing to the ear as they are pleasing to the eye. David Schweizer's direction comes as a sort of deliverance from the decadent cadences of Eckert's performance and interwoven texts; the end result is well-spoken but emotionally tame.

On the surface, we have Reinhart Poole (Eckert), an ethics professor teaching his final class at seminary: he has just been fired for his provocative lessons, the likes of which encourage doubt: "Doubt is how we maintain our faith," he intones, his voice a melodic brimstone, his face flickering with the sinister joviality of Forest Whitaker. "Belief without doubt undermines faith." Beneath that is the metadramatic novelty of two Irish masons, Jim and Harrison (Samuel and Beckett sound better), who serve as eternal builders (allegories) in the play Poole is writing. Deeper still, theatrical demonstrations of Poole's lectures on topics ranging from Plato's ever-popular cave (the set itself is within an aluminum-like cave) to a windowless house and the truth-telling devil. These miniature playlets, largely performed by the grandiose Howard Swain and the perfectly restrained David Barlow, end up being the meat of the play, both for Schweizer's image-heavy work and Eckert's point-hammering prose.

The danger that Poole describes when first defining allegory is unfortunately realized: the allegory becomes the story, and Poole's struggles with his runaway brother, spectral parents, and distant wife (Swain and Barlow, whispering into downstage microphones) are subsumed by the animated combinations of gospel and comic a capella or the vaudeville choreography of a old-fashioned showtune. At one point, Poole writes himself into the allegory, only to die and resurrect like a phoenix from a shroud. Luckily, Schweizer's modish, modern direction is well-poised for metaphor: cinder blocks, wood, and plastic are all transmuted by clever lighting.

According to the devil of one parable, "The nature of truth is to be despised but indispensable." With entertaining performances and beautiful scenework, Horizon is far from being despised. But it's also far from a "dangerous pulpit"; the story is so controlled (right down to the Gothic techno music) that we may admire more than think. Comfort is derived not from the absence of horses from a picture (given faith that they are just beyond the frame), but in the painting of a beautifully empty field itself. The view's terrific, but it's lonely way out here in allegory.

PLAY: Don Juan in Chicago

<--- Photo/Monica Freisem

David Ives meant Don Juan in Chicago as one of his patented verbal comedies, but by reversing the expected, he has created an even better love-struck origin story than the historic fables of the womanizing Don Juan. Simply making a bet just doesn't raise the stakes enough: no, here our Don Juan makes a deal with the devil: not for sex (he's too busy with reading to lose his virginity) but to live forever. It's the small print that turns our naive nerd into a seducer: if he doesn't "romance" a different woman every night, he'll forfeit his soul (and that of his servant, Leporello, who is unwillingly along for the ride). Worse than sex turning into a chore (think Wilt Chamberlain, multiplied by eight) is Mephistopheles's extra twist: the first woman he sleeps with, Doña Elvira, is the woman of his dreams, whom he is doomed never to sleep with again, lest he lose his immortality. And if that weren't bad enough, she becomes immortal too, a constant reminder of his inconstancy. Oh, and even worse (for them, not us): every time the devil comes around or the seduction gets heavy, they start speaking in verse.

Cut to 146,000 women later, Chicago, where Don Juan now goes by Don Johnson, and Leporello goes by Lefty, and the swank castle has eroded to a dank bachelor pad in the slums. His latest "conquest," Sandy, was one of his victims 23 years ago; Doña Elvira, disguised as a southerner, is still trying to sleep with "The Don," and his only recourse may be to steal the sweet, naive Zoey away from his neighbor, Mike. To quote the show, "It's either cum, or kingdom come."

Owen M. Smith's direction nails the enunciation on both, with a nice paralleling scene change between Spain and Illinois, and his cast manages to balance the sex with doom without going overboard with either. The actors are also great with Ives's wit, rhyming iniquitous with ubiquitous or cupidity with stupidity without batting an eyelash. Of particular note is Doug Nyman, who wins our hearts with his plaintive asides and grabs our attention with his energetic explicatives.

In the first act, the action runs a little slow, though it's spiced up by our asthmatic Queen of a devil, played to a delightful T by Stephen Balantzian. However, once the jokes have all been established and the stage set, Ives runs into a full-blown farce, with windows, doors, and beds all popping open, and character twists flying in and out through any and all openings. The energy builds into a nice comic crescendo, and the wordplay, steady throughout, keeps us engaged in the somewhat predictable story. From alliteration ("the pinnacle of pulchritude") to syllogism ("I have no reason to live, but that's no reason not to live"), Don Juan in Chicago is just a well-mannered delight.

PLAY: "Penetrator"

One of the only good things about the Iraq War is that it is similar enough to the Gulf War (Bush War One) to give many playwrights the opportunity to update their material and give it a second go. Case in point with Anthony Nielson's Penetrator, in which a disturbed, AWOL soldier seeks solace in his memories of a happier past, only to find that his best friend, Max, has moved on from their patented duo of "you're the brains and I'm the brawn." The Max (Michael Mason) who opens the show is a self-obsessed asshole, playing Halo 2 with his eyes glued to a TV resting atop a black egg-crate, the sound blaring, the lights from the game exploding in static waves against his glazed skin. As he drinks beer, he switches from the game to a porno, only to get interrupted, mid-jerk, by his roommate, Alan (Jared Culverhouse).

Nielson's play does a terrific job of building the camaraderie between these two; they all but complete each other's lines. Alan is the shyer of the two, overweight and mustached, but together, the two quote old TV shows and re-enact the music video of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. This, however, isn't the play that Nielson wants to give us, which is why there is the constant foreshadowing of a man hitchhiking in the rain as an ominously low voice-over rants sexual abuses, and why the program warns us of mature and violent content. The Flaming Lips are many things, but graphic isn't one of them. As a result of Jeremy Torres' direction (and of the small space), the enjoyable opening becomes layered with tension, a mood that only grows terser when this man, Woody (Cole Wimpee), actually arrives.

At first, Woody's presence is that of a thousand other plays: he is all at once crazy, retarded, and depressed, speaking in a sullen, choppy tone that somehow manages to combine all of those traits. After contradicting his own story about being discharged from the army (or being given money, being molested, escaping), he pulls out a nasty, foot-long knife, and accuses Alan of being a "Penetrator," i.e., one of the men in the Black Room who experimented on him. One of the advantages to the theater's set-up (the audience sits almost in the round) is that our reactions to the dangerous blocking become part of the show, and it would be an understatement to say that the show is not only a pitch-dark drama but terrifying, as well.

The show doesn't really answer any of the questions it presents, and it doesn't do much toward resolving the friendship between Max and Woody: there is the feeling that it is content with just scaring the audience with a lot of graphic monologues and in-your-face action. However, it is gripping, and if Jeremy Torres were to tighten up some of the long and artificially inserted pauses of the first half, it would be a far more effective scare tactic about the military. Woody keeps saying that "It was better before," and at times, I'm inclined to believe him -- the play has two distinct halves -- but the experience (far better than anything a movie can throw at you) is worth it for those who have forgotten what it's like to be unsettled by a play.

PLAY: "I.E., In Other Words"

Oh, it would be so easy for me to just say [insert exclamatory rave] for I.E., In Other Words and be done with it. But although Mark Greenfield's inventive epic (yet intermissionless) fable is filled with characters who speak in the postmodern ("Abrupt interruption," "Clearly fake pleasantry to you," or "Oh, Sam dot dot dot"), it's more a clever shorthand than an excuse to back out of writing. Between the excellent ensemble (The Bats, the Flea's young resident company) and the tight direction of Kip Fagan, the show is a rollicking absurdity, as much musical as Adam Rapp's recent Essential Self-Defense and as bitterly metadramatic in atmosphere as Urinetown, right down to the use of places like Localtownsville and Citycity. Even Michael Casselli's set design is modish, a long curtain that unfurls across the basement theater like a hip skin for one's iPod.

Sam (a resolutely charming Teddy Bergman) is looking for fame so that he can win the heart of his fickle, cucumber-eating sweetheart, Jen (the sweet Elizabeth Hoyt), and her father-figure, Uncle Pop. His journey takes him from the sunny countryside and its villainous Pete Shemp (Jaime Robert Carrillo) to the gloomy cityscape, and from the yokels to the ethnic stereotypes. Not every joke works, but they aren't given enough time to fall flat on their face: the play has thirty-three characters (played by fourteen actors) and is only ninety minutes. So we'll get to meet the disco-dancing Good Cops in the same breath that we encounter Nathaniel, the sort of cell mate who would rape you, if he didn't find it so cliche. Actors also have the opportunity to play a wide variety of hammy hipsters, like Kelly Miller, who kills as a semiotics instructor, or Kina Bermudez, who is welcome to bring pies on stage any time.

The show is a long way from being crisp (the sound cues were way off, although the actors played them off for laughs), and some of the musical numbers falter (intentionally, for some). But when it comes together, as with Jen and Sam's overlapping letter-writing duet about the expositional passage of time, there's something thrillingly trendy about it. And when the going gets weird, the going gets good: who wouldn't laugh at the pointed question "You got something against ghosts fucking?"

I.E., In Other Words, you should go and see this show while it's still fresh off the funny farm. Good ideas, good execution, and the always intimate Underground of the Flea make for one great evening of theater, no matter how you parse it.