Playwright: Neil LaBute. At: Profiles Theatre's The Main Stage, 4139 N. Broadway. Tickets: 773-549-1815; www.profilestheatre.org; $35-$40. Runs through: June 30
Filmmaker and playwright Neil LaBute is famed for creating nasty and manipulative characters. But those LaBute characters are so complex and juicy to play that it's no surprise that a go-for-broke storefront company like Profiles Theatre has forged a tight relationship with LaBute over the years, presenting many Midwest debuts of his work.
So it's quite the occasion for Profiles to present a world premiere stage adaptation of LaBute's seminal 1997 film In the Company of Men. The film famously put LaBute and actor Aaron Eckhart (both graduates of Brigham Young University) on the map thanks to the massive amount of controversy it generated.
In the Company of Men started life as a play before it was adapted to film, so Labute's stage revision is a homecoming of sorts. As in the film, the play focuses on two embittered Midwestern corporate guys named Chad (Jordan Brown) and Howard (Brennan Roche), who strangely decide to emotionally manipulate a random and dejected woman as a way of getting back at women who recently walked out on them.
The two find their mark in Christine (Jessica Carleton), a hearing-impaired office temp who marvels at the sudden and dueling attention that Chad and Howard shower upon her. But when the truth comes out, the revelations of betrayal and cutthroat bullying are shocking.
Director Rick Snyder has guided In the Company of Men's return to its stage roots immaculately with great performances all around in the company.
Brown is appropriately loathsome as the attractive, yet aggressively full-of-himself Chad, while Roche isn't afraid to play up the faults of the more empathetic Howard. As Christine, Carleton can be heartbreaking through her self-aware impaired dialogue and speeches (her character in particular is aided by the extra monologues that LaBute has written for the main trio to explain themselves).
It also helps to play out this malevolent material against such a chillily corporate unit set by designer Thad Hallstein. One of his smart symbolic touches is to expose pipes of fresh water and sewage jutting from behind the stylish late 1980s office locations perhaps to reflect on the rotten cores of the outwardly handsome Chad and Howard.
Like the film, there's a percussive score between scenes (possibly to point out the primal and revengeful urges of the men), though the sequence of events is stretched out over months instead of weeks. There's also a tighter focus on the characters thanks to the reduction of film locales, so it's a safe bet that In the Company of Men should find plenty of success in subsequent stage productionsespecially if they're as shudder-inducing and good as Profiles' brilliant and deliberately nasty piece of work.