"Oh well, whatever,
never mind":
Neil Labute and the Problem of Authenticity
By Jeff Turner
The Distance from Here
By Neil LaBute
MCC Theater at The Duke
229 W. 42nd St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Neil LaBute's The Distance From Here,
an MCC Theatre production directed by Michael Greif at the Duke
Theatre, is a tale of socially malnourished kids adrift in a suburban
wasteland of strip malls and parking lots. The play was first
performed in London by the Almeida Theatre Company in 2002 under
the direction of David Leveaux. Championing the London production
in The New Yorker, John Lahr declared that LaBute, "in
his most ambitious and best play to date, gets inside the emptiness
of American culture, the masquerade of pleasure and the evil of
neglect." For Lahr, LaBute's play was a singular American achievement,
a stunning work that forced its audience to "stare at the terrible
so as to fathom it."
The action focuses primarily on sixteen-year-old
Darrell and his best friend Tim. Saddled with a deeply dysfunctional
family and a general disdain for the world, Darrell is a walking
contradiction: an angry, disengaged, acerbically funny kid with
just enough intelligence to recognize that life is an empty spectacle
punctuated by bouts of human cruelty. "He'd have an angel's
face if not for the downward twist his smile makes," LaBute
writes of Darrell in his stage directions (the play was published
in 2003)--a description that seems to reference earlier, more
sentimental, social reform melodramas like Sidney Kingsley's 1935
Dead End or the 1938 Jimmy Cagney/Humphrey Bogart film
Angels with Dirty Faces. Darrell, however, is burnt out
beyond repair. Hovering at the margins of Darrell's world, Tim
serves as the play's sentimental character. Still recovering from
the scars of an abusive childhood, Tim is earnest and more passive,
but he also harbors secrets born of loyalty for his closest friend.
In his preface to the play, LaBute remembers
the delinquent teens with whom he interacted as an adolescent:
In high school, I sat next to a bunch
of boys like Darrell and Tim in woodshop and algebra and study
hall and watched them simmer and burn and consistently pull
down a solid D- in nearly every subject. They knew, even at
sixteen, that they had absolutely no hope in this life and they
were pretty pissed off about it. Pretty damn pissed indeed .
. . The Distance From Here takes a whack at capturing
some of that teenage rage in a story about families. Shattered
families to be sure, but families all the same.
This filtering of the dramatic narrative
through personal memories lends the play a certain sense of authenticity.
In particular, the characters' fiercely laconic, syntactically
stunted speech patterns convey a grim immediacy. LaBute wants
us to know he isn't making this stuff up; he's simply shaping
the "climate of unboundaried emotional confusion" (to quote Lahr)
into dramatic form. What you see is what we are, LaBute is arguing.
Youth is indeed symbolically central to
American national identity, and this fact raises the stakes in
all dramatic representations of youth. American audiences seem
to be fascinated by the allure, the chic thrill of "childhood
in crisis" narratives. While radical youth pierce, tattoo, thrash,
dope and fuck--utilizing their bodies as sites of resistance and
transgression--adults have continually commodified or sensationalized
their rebellions. Consider this list of recent plays: Rebecca
Gilman's The Glory of Living, Peter Morris's Square
Root Minus One, Alexandra Cunningham's No. 11 (Blue and
White), Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek,
William Mastrosimone's Like Totally Weird, Jessica Goldberg's
Refuge, Kenneth Lonergan's This is Our Youth
and James Urbanati's Hazelwood Jr. High. Or this group
of recent films: Kids, Boy's Don't Cry, Thirteen, Menace II
Society, Elephant, Donnie Darko, L.I.E. and Better Luck
Tomorrow. In all of these, American youth at the turn of
the millennium is rendered as dangerously other--an eroticized,
hyper-aggressive organism whose presence threatens the social
body. Youth is not represented with an eye for accuracy or authenticity
but, more often than not, celebrated for its pathological violence,
moral indifference and fascistic desire. Such representations
revel in a vision of America as a depleted, empty, consumer wasteland
without future or hope--the characters and the audience
hyped up by the adrenaline rush of nihilistic abandon. Youth rarely
narrates or constructs its own subjectivity in the American public
sphere; it is shaped by and/or filtered through adult fears, pleasures
and desires.
The opening scene of The Distance From
Here places Darrell and Tim at the zoo in front of a cage of monkeys
and the metaphoric implications are all too obvious. LaBute seems
to be borrowing from Howard Korder's 1987 play Fun and
Mike Myers and Dana Carvey's 1992 film Wayne's World,
but his most obvious textual reference in these opening moments
is Mike Judge's incendiary MTV cartoon series from the early 1990s,
"Beavis and Butthead." The difference between Darrell and those
idiot-savants, whose ironic critique of American pop culture worked
to empower teenagers exiled to the margins of the American dream,
is that Darrell's rage is palpable yet unsatiated. The caged animals
on display do nothing to mitigate his self-loathing.
When the audience is not watching Darrell
and Tim hanging out with friends, or Darrell's girlfriend Jenn
at the mall bus stop, or the school detention center, or even
an empty "slab of blacktop forced up against the back corner
of a building," the action returns to Darrell's living room,
described by LaBute as "[w]ell worn and thread bare. Not messy
but cheap. Really cheap." Here Darrell contends with his
overworked, under-appreciated, thirty-eight-year-old mother Cammie;
his twenty-one-year-old step-sister Sheri and her unwanted, infant
son; and Cammie's thirty-three-year-old live-in boyfriend Rich--a
"plain-faced but muscular" Gulf War veteran who is sleeping
with both mother and step-daughter. These household scenes are
sexually charged and uncomfortably claustrophobic, brimming with
inchoate rage and frustration. An atmosphere of intimidation and
defeat permeates the space, underscored by the continuous, unnerving
wail of Sheri's neglected baby.
The action culminates in a series of violent
collisions. In an effort to remember a moment of childhood reverie,
Darrell turns to Cammie for more specific detail:
CAMMIE: Truthfully, I don't recall that
much about you. Really. Growing up, I mean.
DARRELL: No?
CAMMIE: Nah. Just fucking happened and then, one day, well,
there you were. Darrell. (BEAT) Course I can remember taking
you around places when you were little, the store and stuff,
and losing you at the mall one time--Shopping Center, they used
to call it, "Shopping Center"--you crawled under a goddamn bench
outside Sears and I couldn't find you for, maybe, twenty minutes
. . . Shit like that I recall, but you, I mean, just you as
an individual--you never really made that big an impression.
Idyllic fantasies expunged, Darrell stoically
returns to the television, "clicking through the channels,
one after the next, faster and faster." But in the following
scene, set again in the zoo, at a penguin pool currently closed
for repairs, Darrell startles Tim and Jenn by arriving with his
kidnapped nephew unsafely stowed inside a duffle bag.
"I wanna ransom 'em to you. You and Tim,"
he snarls. Jealous that his girlfriend has been fucking around
and angry that Tim may have played a role in Jenn's deceit, Darrell
demands answers in exchange for the worryingly silent infant.
When he discovers Jenn was pregnant with his baby two summers
earlier and that Tim helped to arrange a brutal, backroom abortion--a
physical pummeling in exchange for oral sex--Darrell is dumbfounded.
With his childhood erased by his unfeeling mother and his own
child destroyed by a repugnant act of desperation, Darrell hurls
the duffle bag over the wall and into the icy pool of water. Is
this a malevolent act of uncontrollable rage or a twisted attempt
at barbarous compassion? LaBute leaves the choice up to us. In
any case, a fight breaks out between Darrell and Tim, leaving
both a bloody, broken mess. Darrell is the last one standing,
unsuccessfully pleading with Jenn to escape with him.
If
these events sound a little familiar, they are. The climactic
killing is eerily reminiscent of the violent infanticide at the
heart of Edward Bond's 1965 play Saved, though LaBute's
text lacks Bond's audaciously vitriolic critique of post-war British
despair. The world has grown still harder, colder, and more immune
to human atrocity in the forty years since Saved was
first staged, and the ghost of Bond's play haunts The Distance
From Here on every page.
One might ask, who is the audience for
this kind of theatre? The play does seem more interested in authenticity
than most of the works just mentioned, but is it a work of social
naturalism as Emile Zola would have it? Or is it merely an exhilarating
piece of theatrical slumming? To succeed financially LaBute's
working-class milieu must play to the trendy downtown theatre
crowd that supports production groups like the Manhattan Class
Company as well as to those mostly white, college-educated patrons
of "alternative" culture who choose to attend challenging plays
in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis and Seattle. One doesn't imagine
The Distance From Here crossing boundaries of class to
speak directly to those to whom LaBute supposedly gives voice,
and therein lies the conundrum. What purpose does LaBute's stab
at authenticity serve?
To address this question, I turn my attention
to that section of his potential audience who might self-identify
as "Generation X." "Generation-X" (a term coined by novelist Douglas
Copeland) came of age in the late-1980s and early-1990s and was
particularly influenced by the socially subversive rock-n-roll
movement called "grunge." Shaped by the merging of thrash metal
and punk styles in Seattle, Washington, the grunge aesthetic--as
performed by such bands as Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, Soundgarden,
Pearl Jam and Nirvana--fought to resist corporate hegemony and
the homogenized sounds of popular American music (think of Bobby
McFerrin's innocuously insipid anthem "Don't Worry, Be Happy,"
or the multi-platinum success of Milli Vanilli), preferring an
abrasive, often socially conscious, DIY rock-n-roll sneer. Embraced
by a legion of suburban white youth, the movement certainly felt
authentic at first, inspiring a generation to reject brand-name
corporate conformity in favor of anti-style (torn jeans and thrift-store
flannel) and an earnest reinvention of rock tropes. The bands'
dark music articulated a resonant poetics of youthful alienation
(recall Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" video or Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen
Spirit," for example), yet the overwhelming success of Pearl Jam
and Nirvana also marked the movement's early demise. By the time
Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, grunge had already been
appropriated and repackaged by corporate music labels, and "authentic"
grunge fashion could be purchased in any mall across the country.
When subcultural style becomes so quickly and easily commodified,
it is no wonder that representations of youthful nihilism become
popular cultural products for cynical young audiences.
Larry Clark's controversial 1995 film Kids,
written by the then twenty-year-old Harmony Korine, was something
of a watershed event in this evolution of representation of American
youth. Kids clearly articulated the growing dissatisfaction
and social alienation felt by many young adults across the country,
and it was generally read as a truthful portrait. As Rolling
Stone's Peter Travers wrote: "What sets Kids apart
as daringly original, touching, and alive is its authenticity."
It was the series of horrific school shootings in America during
the latter half of 1990s, however, culminating in the Littleton,
Colorado, massacre at Columbine High School, that most widely
illuminated the reality that many American youth felt disconnected
from adults, alienated from their peers, and filled with an enormous
amount of loneliness and rage. While a complete analysis of the
Columbine murders and the moral panic they instigated for frightened
adults throughout the nation is beyond the scope of this essay,
it is my contention that the ways these acts of brutality were
mediated and disseminated to the public contributed to further
alienating the young from adult forms of authority.
Edgy, malevolent representations of childhood
on the margins of society were celebrated by an interpretive community
looking to elevate such fictions--whether sincerely or ironically--as
potent markers of a culture in decline. The "dark romance with
risk," to borrow a phrase from a Newsweek article published
in the weeks following the Columbine murders, was not only an
indicator of youthful rebellion (seen as both healthy and potentially
self-destructive), but a palpable desire which shaped the way
audiences were drawn to transgressive images of angry, disaffected,
and violent kids. The act of watching dangerous teens on the stage
and screen served to channel the frustrations of youthful, privileged
and educated audience members ambivalent toward American consumer
culture and ripe for subversive spectacles of neglect and indifference.
The attraction to such fictions does not
constitute an investment in the pursuit of authenticity, as LaBute
might have us believe. His play does, however, interrogate the
idea that authenticity can ever be embodied on stage or captured
by film. The Distance From Here is appealing not because
it offers a vision of unmediated reality, but because it provides
its audience with an edgy, apolitical escape from the real, representing
teen life as if it existed outside the boundaries of history and
public policy. The illusion of the authentic in the play makes
invisible the social and cultural forces that shape our mythological
notions of America as a land of freedom and plenty. Any possibility
of giving voice to these kids is contained by the very act of
representing them. Rather than offering insight and analysis into
the material conditions that produce teenage alienation and despair,
The Distance From Here ultimately makes invisible the
causes of its characters' inchoate rage and disconnection. Darrell,
Tim and Jenn are little more than empty signifiers, sensationalized
ciphers consumed by the intense gaze of adult desire.
At this crossroads of the real and the
artificial, the politics of representation is always fluid, always
contesting, re-constructing, and re-presenting cultural notions--however
problematic--of the authentic. In our current media-saturated
age, where recently uncovered video images of Dylan Klebold and
Eric Harris continue to circulate four years after their killing
spree at Columbine High, representations of teenage bodies on
stage may have the potential to offer up a version of authenticity
absent from cinematic and televisual images. But The Distance
From Here, while certainly gruesome and electrifying, holds
an essentially negligible mirror up to nature. John Lahr aside,
other New York critics got it right this time. Ben Brantley wrote
in The New York Times that the production was "synthetic
thunder of cold, easy irony." Alexis Soloski, writing for The
Village Voice, said the play's social message was lost in
"aimlessness and forgettable dialogue." In conclusion, the morbid
fascination of this play's depiction of extreme adolescent behavior
reveals a complicity between such sensationalized narratives and
the audiences whose patronage confers the illusions of legitimacy
and real understanding.
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