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Darlinghurst Theatre
until 22 March
Bookings: (02) 8356 9987
… Ok. This is how it goes … So begins the first direct address to the audience from our seemingly affable unnamed narrator (who wryly admits the possibility that his account of events is unreliable) and it sets up Neil LaBute’s 10-years-on-from-high-school love triangle.
The threesome includes the aforementioned narrator, who has returned to his hometown, the whiter than white former cheerleader he still adores, and the black former track star she has married. It will all turn in a very nasty direction. There is no racial utopia reached here.
Aaah, but this is LaBute, I hear you say, and if anyone is going to make hanky-panky unfunny he is your man. True, he could be accused of turning his characters into a pitiless but honest spectacle. A little like the writing equivalent of a club bunny under convenience store fluoros at 3am …
For the first 15 minutes of this play I was wriggling in my seat thinking I had vacated my couch to sit in a theatre and watch a NBC sitcom.
Having said that, I fully believed the actors were the small-town Americans they were supposed to be. (It seems that two out of the three cast members are actually Yanks.) Then as the story continued and the married couple and the narrator (now their lodger) seemed to enjoy their public mutual humiliations, even bringing it home into a casual backyard BBQ, I realised LaBute’s brilliance and how he has an idiosyncratic yet seriously considered grasp of why people hurt one another and themselves.
It’s wonderful stuff. The play’s buzz might come from LaBute playing the race card, and you are guaranteed to laugh out loud even when you’re cringing at the tirade of horrible things said out loud, white to black and black to white. I know as a woman seeing this play I felt the playwright was also exposing what men only say in the company of other men and briefly considered entering a closed convent …
Director Toby Schmitz elicits bristling yet believable work from his terrific cast. Patrick Brammall (the unnamed man) goes deep beneath the surface of his role’s comic loser persona. Rebecca Rocheford Davies (Belinda) is a class act, as is Wayne McDaniel (Cody), handsome and charismatic and able to convey such practiced suavity. Combined, they offer a searing portrayal of men and women and men and men locked in vicious combat.
This show is definitely worth checking out.
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Arts & Entertainment 
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