Neil Labute hates American theater, and sounds immature doing so

This Thursday I will be seeing This is How It Goes as part of the Profiles Theatre's year long Neil Labute festival. I must say, however, that I will be going into the theater with a bit of a chip on my shoulder against Neil LaBute. He recently railed against American theater in The Guardian, in a column both crudely written and poorly argued. He argues that though theater is not dying, American dramatists are "small writers in America...writing tiny plays about tiny ideas with two to four characters, so that we get produced and nobody loses any money." He also accuses American playwrights of "shying away from politics." He then comes out with this brilliant paragraph:

Let's face it, most writers are pussies. We sit back and watch the world go by, writing down the things we find funny or sad while trying to make a buck off it. We use our lives, or the lives of others, for personal gain, and we defend it by saying it's "in the public domain" or "true", and therefore OK to slop around in someone else's pain.

The fact that the same person who wrote The Shape of Things can spurt out a paragraph like this saddens me, never mind the fact that he ignores the incredible diversity and talent that's coming out of American theater. Has he even seen August: Osage County, or anything by Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Will Eno, or Jose Rivera?

Maybe he was writing the column to self-flagellate, as he notes:

On many levels, I think we playwrights are failing - and again, I include myself in this. I tend to write about small groups of men and women (friends, lovers, co-workers, family), locked in some kind of gender struggle. These are the politics that interest me, and I scour over them like Herman Melville's Bartleby sitting at his little wooden desk. In the course of a decade of writing, however, I have also tried to look at religion, race, art, national tragedy and a host of other social ills. Am I a naturally political writer? Not at all. A writer like Tony Kushner strikes me as someone far more naturally gifted at bringing the private and public worlds of his characters to life: he may be the most obvious link between the British writers I've long admired and contemporary America. But I have a capricious streak in me that likes writing about the unexpected, messing about with what my audience might want to see or hear or experience - and I think of these as positive qualities.

If you admit to reasons for not writing HUGE FUCKING DEFINING POLITICAL DRAMA, then where's the beef? It should also be noted he just mentioned an American playwright who, wouldn't you know it, rights good political theater, making his argument seem even more pathetic.

Ironically, right before I read this column, I was looking over my collection of John Heilpern essays and found a column entitled "The Anglophile New York Times." That column took issue with a published conversation of the New York Times theater critics on the superiority of British theater. Heilpern rightly called it "a vaudevillian act" that displays "a craven need to overcelebrate [British plays] at the cost of the American theater." He noted that London is constantly overripe with "old" plays and noted the lackluster quality of British transfers, especially when compared to American playwrights of the time like "Tony Kushner, the Wooster Group, Suzan-Lori Parks, Danny Hock, Ellen Stewart's La Mama, Margaret Edson, Savion Glover, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, or the staging of Hedwig and the Angry Inch." In short, LaBute's argument is not new, nor has it suddenly acquired any credibility.

George Hunka quickly responded to LaBute's bogus claims, and makes him LaBute look like a fool (and sounds a lot more reasonable as well). He correctly notes:

1) "In the body of his essay, though, he approvingly cites Christopher Shinn, Wallace Shawn, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, David Rabe and Amiri Baraka as fellow countrymen he admires and looked up to as a student in that hard-scrabble, tough-talking environment, the MFA program at the University of Kansas. Half a dozen for the Brits; half a dozen for the Yanks. So there doesn't seem to be any playwright gap, at least not in Neil's world."

2) "On the same day that Neil's article appeared, however, an email arrived in my inbox from a New York theatre company ironically called The Fire Department. It promoted an upcoming show, At War: American Playwrights Respond to Iraq. The show is a collection of scenes about just those larger issues of the day that Neil feels are being neglected by American dramatists. The scenes include work by Obie-winning playwright José Rivera and by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, whose devised play The Exonerated (about capital punishment in the US) was produced to considerable popular and critical acclaim several seasons back."

3) "If Neil still wants to meet me after school behind the gym, that's fine. But he's not the only playwright these days who "writes about [subjects] of some importance ... with honesty and courage." He's not even the only American playwright who does so. And I'm guessing, by the way, that Britain has its share of shitty playwrights too."

Basically, it's sad to see one of America's premier playwrights loudly and rudely denounce himself and his peers in an article that seems like it was written at 2 a.m. after too much wine and getting an email about The Little Mermaid. Let's hope this doesn't precipitate a Mamet-like decline.