Book #21: Bash

Title: Bash: Latterday Plays


Author: Neil LaBute


I've watched several of Neil LaBute's movies (Nurse Betty, Possession and In the Company of Men) and I've avidly followed his career as a member of the LDS church whose work appeals to a mainstream audience. Bash, one of his most recent works, is a play in three acts (sort of three separate mini-plays) in which the main character commits an unspeakable crime. In two of the three plays, the character is LDS.


Ok, so if you're planning to read or watch the plays and you don't want me to ruin it for you, don't read any further....


I read a lot. And I think I'm pretty jaded as a result. Well, maybe not jaded, but not easily surprised or terrorized by what I read. But LaBute's first play, "Iphegenia in Orem" left me sobbing and I couldn't get the story out of my mind for days. I still get sort of creeped out thinking about it and it's been a couple of weeks since I read it. In the play, the speaker is a businessman from Utah who has invited a woman into his room while on a business trip. Instead of seducing her, he tells her a story about how he and his wife lost a child a year earlier. The baby was five months and the wife left her in his care, sleeping on the bed in the master bedroom, while she ran out to the grocery store. He was feeling depressed, because a friend had just called to tell him he was losing his job. When he went in to check on the baby, he found that she had wedged her way into the bed and was going to suffocate. Instead of rescuing her, he realized that he wouldn't get laid off in the wake of a family tragedy, and instead pushed her a little bit deeper under the covers.


I have my own five-month-old, and every time I looked at her for a few days after reading the play, I couldn't believe that a parent could look at their child struggling and not save them. I guess he was feeling tortured a year later (especially since the friend was joking when he called to tell him about the layoff), but sometimes I think people deserve to feel tortured.


The other two plays deal with similar themes, but it was the first one that struck me so powerfully.


--originally published 6/11/07