Bash

In my quest to support local college theater, I managed to find a small theater in one of the colleges on the campus of Princeton University to attend Bash, two monologues by Neil Labute, performed by Princeton seniors. The monologues are two-thirds of a trilogy of one-acts by Labute, who is also a filmmaker who has made such controversial films as In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things, as well as being an accomplished playwright.

The one-acts that the students performed are called Medea Redux and Iphegenia in Orem. You may note that both of these titles refer to Greek myths, and both concern infanticide. Needless to say the evening of theater was not a laugh riot, but was considerably gripping.

Medea Redux was performed by Laura Breckenridge (pictured here, in a photo from The Daily Princetonian). She is an actress of some accomplishment, having done a few movies and some TV, most notably a multi-episode arc on Gossip Girl. She has returned to Princeton after a few years off, and there's something comforting about a performer serious enough about her craft that even after finding some success in lightweight TV fare she has done a difficult monologue about a woman who kills her own child in a theater in front of twenty or so non-paying patrons.

The monologue is done in an interrogation room. The woman sits at a desk, a tape recorder before her, and she tells the unseen detective about how she was seduced by a teacher, bore his son, and then many years later killed that son. Breckenridge holds an unlit cigarette in her twitching hand, immediately drawing the audience into the moment, waiting for the startling revelation that is sure to come (given that the name Medea is in the title, we can guess). Labute, basing his play on a Greek myth, immerses it in the contemporary, though, as the woman describes being taken on a school trip to an aquarium, age 13, and how the teacher pressed himself against her while was against the glass, a hammerhead shark swimming by. Pretty chilling stuff. Her dark eyes shining with moisture, Breckenridge is nearly flawless in her explication of the tale, though Labute offers little reason why the act is committed (the real Medea was pissed off at Jason, her errant husband, running off with another woman, and the parallel with this story doesn't jibe).

The second monologue is Iphigenia in Orem, performed by Adam Zivkovic. It is also in the form of a confession, except this time it's in a hotel room. Zivkovic is a young salesman who has persuaded a man he met in the cocktail lounge to come up to his room to hear his story. It is another chilling tale, involving a dead baby. The Iphigenia of myth was the daughter of Agamemnon, who was sacrificed to appease the Gods. In this story, set in the Utah suburb of Orem, the man has learned that he is to be layed off and, given an opportunity to save his infant daughter from suffocation in some blankets, does nothing, thinking her death will be a financial boon. Then he learns that his boss was playing a joke on him.

Zivkovic has given himself a tall order. The monologue runs for about forty-five minutes, and he doesn't quite have the pacing right. There are too many awkward pauses (perhaps he was struggling to remember his lines--at least that's what it seemed like it). But he had the character down, a young otherwise vigilant man (presumably a Mormon, given the location and his reference to not drinking) who carries with him a powerful secret.

It is thought that all the character in these one-acts are Mormon (there is a reference to Utah in the Medea monologue, and the full title of the trilogy is Bash: Latter-Day Plays), given that Labute was once a Mormon. To use mythic instances of infanticide to comment on a contemporary religion is certainly eyebrow-raising, but I'm not sure it has a deeper meaning than shock value, which is something that Labute specializes in. He's a writer who seems interested in angering his audiences as much as anything. I remember walking out of the theater livid at the end of The Shape of Things, but at the same time deep in admiration for Labute at how he was able to manipulate me. There's a little of that in Bash, but not nearly to that level. What we have here really are two descriptions of those who have committed what is generally regarded as the most horrific of crimes and, instead of an explanation for them, we have instead an examination of them, performed by one gifted actress and one talented actor.