Nasty Business
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“I loved Chicago,” he says. “It was very exciting to be a young playwright here. People didn’t just embrace or encourage new work but passionately engulfed new plays.” Raised in Spokane, Washington, LaBute attended Brigham Young University, worked for a computer company in New York, and pursued a graduate degree at the University of Kansas before he moved to Rogers Park in the late 80s. One of his first productions, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times, was staged as part of Bailiwick’s Directors’ Festival, but LaBute made his local reputation with Lepers, a brilliant play delineating contemporary sexual attitudes that was staged at Cafe Voltaire in 1993. “I probably would have stayed much longer,” LaBute says, “but I got a scholarship to go to NYU.”
In the Company of Men (named after an essay in Mamet’s 1989 collection Some Freaks) explores the brutal and insidious ways that men dehumanize women in the American workplace. (A review of the film appears in Section One.) Chad and Howard, white-collar workers stuck midway up the corporate ladder, arrive in a nameless city to complete a project at an unspecified company; angry about their respective failed relationships, they agree to find a vulnerable woman, simultaneously romance her, elevate her self-esteem, and then dump her. As in LaBute’s plays, language is a sword, only here it preserves a rigid social order in which men lunge for power, manipulating the weaker players in an elegant but vicious game. When the charming and malevolent Chad is asked why he wants to ruin people’s lives, he responds icily, “Because I can.”
