Family life of an American psycho

10 April 2012

What dark designs and desires lurk behind the affable, ordinary facades of Neil LaBute's characters. You would never think the people dreamed up by this remarkable American film director and playwright could turn out to be murderers, child-molesters and exploiters. Yet out of the blue, as his chilling, new play The Distance From Here demonstrates, a young man turns violent and murderous. LaBute sees America through a glass grimly, everywhere beset by casual amorality, its personal relations no longer humane and family-life a breeding ground for secrets and shame.

How appropriate that the The Distance From Here's first scene should be staged near the monkey cage in a zoo, where 17-year-old schoolboys Darrell and Tim gaze with revulsion at the behaviour of apes. The apes, it eventually transpires, have attained a far superior degree of civilisation to that of Darrell, who lives with his mother, Cammie, and her Gulf War veteran boyfriend, Rich, in threadbare, cheap surrounds: not that David Leaveaux's psychologically astute but socially vague production makes it clear to what class Darrell and his family belong.

Giles Cadle's ingenious, turquoise-painted set, which looks like a tenement-block's flat roof and revolves to disclose a bare living room, has an almost Edward Hopperish air of foreboding to its dark interiors. But where are we, in what part of America, and why are Darrell and Tim, who talk in scattergun fusillades of expletives still at school when they come from such obviously deprived families? The questions are unanswered in short-ish, not very sharp scenes, where LaBute provides vignettes from Darrell's family life and gradually reveals the youth's uneasy state of relations with girlfriend Jenn and Tim.

Everywhere, a little sexual provocation, unease or fettered desire hangs in the air. Darrell's 21-year-old stepsister, Shari, with a baby in tow, makes a risky play both for him and the very blue-collar Rich. Yet there's insufficient pace and definition to these scenes. An atmosphere is created but no dramatic points are made. And the allusions to the Gulf War are gratuitously inserted. It's only in the play's closing stages, when information leaks out in lurid explanations and forced confessions, that The Distance From Here discovers real momentum.

A pathetic teenage sub-culture of sexual ignorance and exploitation is duly discovered. Mark Webber's jaunty, wary Darrell, who's forever coming to blows with Jason Ritter's impressive, troubled Tim, remains inscrutable until he reacts to revelations by taking a horrifying turn to the psychopathic. Enrico Colantoni's Rich and Ana Reeder's lusty Shari catch that quality of amoral drift and decline in America which LaBute memorably deplores.

Dish With Herdsman And Goats: Talk

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