Playwright: Neil LaBute . At: Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway . Phone: 773-549-1815; $25 - $21 students, seniors . Runs through: Dec. 16. Photo by Wayne Karl.
Cue the sound of me sighing with exasperation. Things We Said Today is not Grade-A Neil LaBute. The seven one-acts by the playwright known for his ruthless examination of men behaving badly range from mildly engaging to eye-rollingly manipulative to annoyingly pointless. These single-scene endeavors are more Playwriting 101 exercises than stage-worthy dramas. With six directors helming the pieces, they're also receiving a better production than they deserve as part of Profiles' all-LaBute season.
Ever one for tacking on a twist to the final scene, LaBute doesn't veer from his standard operating procedure here. But unlike the clever, haunting turns of superior one-acts such as the trifecta that comprises Bash, the end rotations in Things We Said Today presumes an audience of slow learners. You can see the curveballs coming a mile off.
The most inexcusable of the septet is a bit of wannabe meta-theater wherein LaBute gets cute with the fourth wall and attempts to maneuver the audience into a crisis of conscience. Never mind the lame dialogue and sliver-thin ( non ) characters. What's unforgivable here is the way LaBute keeps changing the structural rules as he goes along. The dialogue all but announces, 'Now the fourth wall is in place,' 'Now it is gone,' 'Now it is back again,' and 'Isn't the playwright clever, toying with you like this?' The result is an affected mess with pretentions of being a mindfuck. And can I just say that any theatrical device that gives audience members the opportunity to yell out 'Don't do it girlfriend!' in the middle of a show is a bad idea?
Things We Said is also burdened with a several non-starters: pieces that amount to nothingness, and not in a good, Waiting for Godot way. In 'Persuasion Paper 101,' we get 10 minutes of repetitive variations on the sentence 'Men suck ass.' That's it—the whole thing: A monologue with a vocabulary of roughly 20 words, including prepositions and conjunctions. Almost equally pointless is Stand-Up, a forgettable monologue about an amateur comic that that spends approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds in take-off mode and then 30 seconds ending in a stall.
Land of the Dead is exceptional for its sound design, but defines itself by inviting unfavorable comparisons to the Twilight Zone. The title piece plays like an outtake from Fatal Attraction while I Love This Game is a ripped-from-the-headlines bit of sermonizing on the ultra-competitive nature of the ugly American.
The saving grace of the production comes with Maggie Liston ( directed by Sarah Franklin ) in Love at Twenty. A captivating mix of innocence and guile as an undergrad about to school a professor in Vengeance 101, Liston soars above the material.