The Wind with a Wolf's Head Howls at the Door

I should mention right here that Neil LaBute's new play is at his full-blown, wide-open scurrilous best, much like "In The Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors." That is, the language is profane, R-rated, and calculatedly shocking. This includes frank talk of sexual matters as symbolic of the more fraught issues we all face in life. So be warned. The blurbs on the cover compare LaBute to Edward Albee, Sam Shepherd, August Strindberg, and David Mamet: some pretty tough customers. But as the critic David Thomson once wrote, tough guy writers are frequently sensitive souls saying, no matter how tough times get, I can take it. (And they try to find beauty in the harsh mechanisms of survival.)

September 11, 2001 seems to be entering our national consciousness as the contemporary counterpart of Dec. 7, 1941: an epochal, terrible event that changes many things forever. Except that we here in post-modern America are more confused in our responses that our grandparents were. "The Mercy Seat" is not really about the attack itself, but about our individual reactions to an overwhelming atrocity. In a preface, LaBute writes that he was on an airline flight when the idea for the play came to him in a flash. He says he "ordered a ginger ale" (perhaps a wink and a nod to his fellow LDS folks), pulled out his laptop, and went to work. He writes that the play is not about politics but a "particular kind of terrorism: the painful, simplistic warfare we often wage on the hearts of those we profess to love."

The play opens in the apartment of Abby Prescott, not far from Ground Zero in Manhattan, on the morning of September 12. A fine white ash covers everything (the cover of the book is a field of white ash with the play's title written out as if by a finger.) Abby is in her forties and a woman of some prominence in an investment firm located in the World Trade Center. (In the New York production she was played by Sigourney Weaver.) Seated on the couch is Ben Harcourt, a man in his thirties, Abby's junior at the firm, and her lover. Ben was supposed to be at work in the Twin Towers, but was in the apartment getting oral sex from Abby when the planes hit.

Who was it that said "character is destiny?" This man and woman are forced by soul-shaking events to confront who they really are. Abby is a strong, competent, mature woman who begins to see her relationship with Ben is a surface thing, a caricature of what she really needs. LaBute's men are generally either sad-sacks or predators. Ben is a sad-sack who aspires to be a predator. Once again LaBute presents us with a guy who makes us painfully aware of our own weaknesses. He is married with small daughters. He confesses to Abby "I always take the easy route, whatever it takes to be liked, get by. That's me. Cheated at school, screwed over my friends, my marriage is a fiasco..." He's a stunted man. He doesn't get Abby's references to the Amazing Kreskin and Audie Murphy; he explodes: knowledge that isn't practical is crap, education that isn't an MBA is s -- t, "Jeopardy" is for a -- -- -- s...(Unfortunately this hit home for me. I've heard similar sentiments expressed in my own extended family. Maybe LaBute heard stuff like this from fellow students at BYU; it's entirely possible.)

Ben sees 9/11 as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape, without financial, legal or emotional complications. He is presumed dead; his cell phone continually rings -- who knows who is frantically trying to reach him. He wants to run away and start over, and he wants Abby to go with him. LaBute manages to raise a lot of questions about American society in this short piece. Ben and Abby both know that their affair is sexual harassment according to the strictest most current definition of the term. Ben argues that his plan to run away is all-American. "That's what Americans do, overcome, do what it takes, we're still going to have Christmas and the World Series." However, LaBute remains a fire-and-brimstone moralist and gives us an unforgettable image of Hell. Ben likes to have sex with Abby from the rear (so he doesn't have to look her in the face.) Abby says "I've had plenty of time to think about things down there." Sometimes she imagines "it's your wife behind me with one of those strap-on things...maybe that's what Hell is. All of your wrongful s -- t played out there in front of you while you're being pumped from behind by someone you've hurt, as your life splashes out on the headboard of the Devil's bedroom." (Not quite the lake of fire as described in the Book of Revelation, but close enough. LaBute's dialogue remains scaldingly and disturbingly funny, as always.)

LaBute places three epigraphs before the play. One is an excerpt from a hymn about "the mercy seat, where Jesus answers prayers." The second is from Edna St. Vincent Millay: "A wind with a wolf's head/ Howled about our door/ And we burned up the chairs/ And sat upon the floor." The third, and most important, is from rocker Nick Cave: "And the mercy seat is waiting/ And I think my head is burning/ And in a way I'm yearning/ To be done with all this measuring of truth." LaBute shows us how ironically hard it is to live in the presence of the mercy seat, to know our actions have eternal consequences. That you can't take the easy way out unless you are willing to abdicate your soul. Like another song says, would you want to see, if seeing meant you had to believe, in things like Jesus and the saints, and all the prophets...? What does that responsibility really involve? In the end, Abby decides to show Ben "more mercy than you've ever shown me", but it's mercy of the cruel-to-be-kind type. In this little play LaBute remains one of the most tough-minded of our artists, a generous dispenser of what he calls "the hardest, coldest currency on the planet" -- honesty.

R.W. Rasband
Heber City, UT
rrasband@yahoo.com