Book #42: Doubt

Title: Doubt
Author: John Patrick Shanley

During our moving frenzy a few months ago, I sat down one night while Eddie was working and watched Doubt on pay per view. Well, at least I tried to watch it. But I fell asleep within the first fifteen minutes. But it's been on my reading list for a while, so last week while we were on our Shakespeare festival trip, I read Doubt. I remember listening to a Fresh Air interview a few months ago with Phillip Seymour Hoffman about his acting in the film version, and it made the play sound so interesting and engrossing. Once again, it just didn't grip me. Maybe it was the contrast of watching a really fantastic stage performance of Comedy of Errors with the slim spareness of the script. Maybe if watching Hoffman and Adams and Streep bring it to life would change my opinion. But I have a feeling I'd have to tackle it at a time when I'm not moving and exhausted.

Book #22: The Mercy Seat

Title The Mercy Seat


Author: Neil LaBute


Another LaBute play about an ethical lapse. In The Mercy Seat, the main character, who was supposed to be in the World Trade Center on 9/11 but was instead with his mistress, is in the process of deciding whether to return to his family or play dead and escape with the mistress.


As I read The Mercy Seat, I felt pretty similar to how I did when I watched In the Company of Men-- a total lack of sympathy or understanding. Maybe it's the essential female-ness of me, but I really can't see how a seemingly normal sort of guy would allow his wife and kids to think he was dead rather than admit to them that he wants to be with his mistress. And maybe he doesn't want to be with the mistress either. I guess it's just that most 35 or 40 year-old guys at least sort of know what they want from life, or at least I expect them to.


--originally published 6/11/07

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