"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.