eil LaBute is an interesting guy. A BYU-educated, LDS playwright and filmmaker, the vast majority of his work falls into the strangely-horrifying-but-you-can't-look-away category. In his film, “In the Company of Men,” two traveling businessmen seek revenge on the opposite sex by seducing the most vulnerable woman they can find—of course, a deaf girl. In “Your Friends and Neighbors,” sexually frustrated and uncommunicative urbanites make each other’s lives miserable. But in “Bash: Latter-day Plays,” LaBute turns his focus closer to home.

“Bash,” which will be playing at the Plan-B Theatre Company Sept. 12-28, is a series of three short plays. Two have only one character on stage, and all three are basically monologues, in which characters relate their experiences to the audience.

A married couple talks about an eventful party in LDS playwright Neil LaBute's "Bash."

Each short is based upon Greek tragedy. In “Medea Redux,” a girl relates her troubled teenage pregnancy. In “Iphegenia in Orem,” an Agamemnon-like business makes a disturbing hotel-room confession to a stranger. And in "A Gaggle of Saints," a straitlaced religious couple (complete with “Ajax-like rage”) relate their experiences at a party in New York City and what happened as the man and some friends took a walk in Central Park. All stories are told with a disturbing sense of detachment, with none of the feelings of regret or catharsis that normally accompany such tales.

“This is riskiest thing we've done in several years,” said Jerry Rapier, the artistic director of the company. Risky, because of those words in the title—Latter-day—that refer to exactly what you think they do. Three of the four characters are LDS and the play uses that as a context to help present its portrait of the complexities of evil in everyday lives.

But the play is just that—an exploration of evil in everyday life—not an excuse to further (pardon the pun) bash the dominant local religion. Indeed, the press release bills the plays as about “three violent and highly disturbed individuals who happen to be Latter-day Saints” and LaBute has described it as “a play about some essentially good people who do some very bad things.”

In short, the four different characters who describe their crimes with such disturbing detachment could be anybody. “The characters just happen to be LDS because that's what LaBute’s background is.” In some cities, the playwright allows the play to be performed without any specific religious references. But at home in Utah (“Bash” was actually originally performed elsewhere, though LaBute wrote the first draft while still at BYU and performed a first reading at the Sunstone symposium), any religious ties stay where they are.

The play resonates differently in other cities, Rapier said. In Salt Lake City, overt mentions of LDS help open much-needed dialogue about normally taboo subjects. “[H]ere it’s much more powerful…there's subtle humor only people here would understand.”

Plan-B chose to perform a work like “Bash” in order to challenge people. “People [in this community] are afraid to question things. A range of topics can only go so far, there's a sense, or a fear of retribution…it's not just necessarily due completely to the dominant religion…it's just how the majority affects anything anywhere,” said Rapier, who has lived in Utah for 10 years. “This really spoke to us for our mission to produce unique, socially conscious theatre, to shake things up a bit.”

But whatever the approach, it's still delicate material, difficult to perform without straying too far to one side or another. The cast and crew had to work hard to stay true to the playwright's vision, the aforementioned dialogue. "We had to let it be honest so that the audience has all of the options as to what to do with this," Rapier said.

"We're not really interested in people agreeing with what anything we've produced has to say, as much as sticking with it to see how it relates to their lives.”

“Bash” runs from Sept. 12-28 at Plan-B Theatre Company, Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m and 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 general admission and $10 for students and are available through ArtTix (355-ARTS, www.ArtTix.com).
bobbi@red-mag.com