To be a Neil LaBute fan, you have to be a little bit of a masochist. You know that no matter how much you’re going to enjoy the work, the overall effect is going to be more of a sucker punch than anything else. This Is How It Goes, the author’s latest work making its premiere at Studio Theater, starts off as quietly unsettling, but builds to be just as ultimately devastating as some of the author’s other brutal triumphs.
This Is How It Goes is a drama with comedic moments about an interracial love triangle, and its language starts off a bit affected, almost clunkily casual. We are guided by a self-proclaimed “unreliable narrator” (the concept works; the self-proclaiming is cheesy), who will tell us the story of three individuals: himself (Eric Feldman), an old high-school crush, Belinda, (Anne Bowles) and the high school sweetheart she married (Benton Greene), a black track star with charisma to spare whose bitterness level has gone up as the years have gone by. LaBute’s flirtation with the removal of the fourth wall can at times feel stilted, but it allows for a lot of interesting theatrical tricks — we see some scenes both how they reportedly happened and how the narrator originally imagined them, and sometimes we see what we suspect isn’t true in the least, but are given no alternative perspective.
The play does a handy job of toying with our own potential prejudices — we see what our gauge is for what we consider offensive, and then realize our permissiveness has allowed even more hatred to breed in its wake. Feldman gives a performance that never allows us to surrender suspicion of his motives, but with enough charm so that we don’t settle quickly into contempt for our lead. Benton Green’s Cody, though, is the performance of the play. We are drawn to his distinctiveness as Belinda is, but part of us is waiting for him to explode, not necessarily with justification. Bowles’ Belinda is fine, if a bit distant, her chemistry with either of her counterparts never particularly apparent.
The staging for This Is How It Goes has some amusing quirks — the rapid appearance of a mini-lawn below a character’s foot, a projection screen conveniently providing the background for everything from a forest to a Sears store. But set and performance compliments aside, you come to a LaBute play for the gut-wrenching, and This Is How It Goes delivers; it shouldn’t take a label like “unreliable narrator” to tell you not to trust a LaBute character – any of them – for very long.
This Is How It Goes runs through Feb. 11 at Studio Theater. Tickets are available online.
