America the Beautiful: Chapter One Review – Neil LaBute’s Bitter State of the Union Address | stage

nIl Laput doesn’t seem to have much hope for humanity. Not only are the American playwright’s characters in these trilogy of short plays cruel and uncaring, but their complete lack of remorse diminishes the significance of their stories. LaBute is portrayed as a provocative character, but his trilogy seems less risky than misanthropic.

Best known for his plays In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things, LaBute has 10 plays presented in three acts in America the Beautiful, a UK premiere in a separate venue staged between the King’s Head Theater and Greenwich.

Although his writing aims for brutality, this trio – previously shown in the US – leaves only the faintest mark. In Hate Crime, two men in an affair (Liam Gidley and Boris Anthony Yorke) ill-advisedly plan to kill one of their fiancées in order to pay out a life insurance payout. Yorke watches anxiously as Jedele’s character boils and stirs, exorcising his internalized homophobia by detailing how he would beat up another man for his queerness. LaBute’s overly inflammatory, easily diverted dialogue is as imprecise as the men’s plan, while James Haddrill’s direction gives the cast plenty of nail-biting to sustain in Jana Lakatos’s boxy, hard-edged set.

Yorke did a good job transforming into the role of the broken soldier in the Kandahar monologue. A man trained in violence, his uniform is impeccable and his posture is perfect as he confesses to a murderous rampage. Like both characters in the hate crime, he is devoid of guilt, directing all the blame—for his crime, and for most crimes—on his wife, or women in general. These are bitter men hardened against the world. Masculinity in America, as LaBute repeatedly slams our heads against the wall, is not in a good way.

In the third play, “The Possible,” the playwright seems to calm down. Maya Nika Pioli and Anna Maria have cheek and chemistry as women and are potentially seductive. The duo does a good job of keeping up the energy even when the writing runs out of heat, but this is a play refreshingly more concerned with the strangeness of humanity than with our mild penchant for violence.