The characters in Filthy Talk certainly deliver on the title's promise. Julia Stiles' (delivering her inimitable stolid but perturbed best) character (Waitress 2) muses, "...wouldn't it be better if we women could just share one Penis? We could keep it in a freezer somewhere..." Waitress 1 (Alice Eve, in a surprisingly nuanced performance for a staged reading) describes her one orgasm, "...I had my orgasm in 2005. Don't get me wrong, I was grateful and I thanked the guy profusely..." She says you could do anything though, and guys just won't go down on you--they don't know how to do it, still she muses, "...but it is just licking, isn't it?"
This in the context of the guys' syncopated machismo. Man 4, in a rant typical of a Labute combatant, swaggers, "...I couldn't believe that gasher...what a cunt." "I know, no slit is worth it," responds Man 3. But we still see their clunky attempts at connection. Many attempts. They just all tend to result in the ennui of filthy-talking accumulated disappointment.
Is that what Labute is telling us? Is all the world-weariness, all the hard-edged battle of his raunchy sexes their natural defense against intimacy, against rejection? Is this just his way of exploring the fundamental story--how do we ever manage to come together? Is this Labute telling us it's all just bluster--these blusterers are really broken-winged birds?
The question of how deeply we can and do hurt each other in the attempt to find romantic connection is always on Labute's mind in his remarkable trilogy. That his characters happen to stumble into their own angry defiance, their elaborate disgusting defenses flown as semaphores, seems inevitable in Labute-world.
Rachel Weisz's chilling performance as the graduate student working on her MFA project in "The Shape of Things (2002)" is a marvel of false bravado. The gauntlet she makes Paul Rudd's character run is brutal: his lonely desire baldly exploited for her sad little narcissistic needs. She's pretty, but she's brutal. Is that why she's brutal? What guy wouldn't come away wary?
I'm a serious fan of the trilogy. Until "Fat Pig (2004)" I wasn't aware it even was a trilogy, a sort of meditation on sexual roles in our "troubled times." When Jeremy Piven falls for the quite overweight but intellectually alluring librarian, he is given to extreme self-doubt and put through the mill by his friends. That we are presented with Kerri Russell, our very own Felicity, as the counterpoint to the librarian--well, it left me, and I'm sure a good part of the men in the audience measuring their own prejudice.
"Reasons to be Pretty (2008),) in rounding out the trilogy, puts two couples into action around each other. Their four monologues, delivered as plaintive missives from beyond the fight, stand for me as the culmination of Labute's message: we're in this together, we haven't the first idea how to connect, and it is easier to hurt you and demean you , than to face my deepest fears.
I for one am grateful that Labute has been given such freewheeling license, as playwright-in-residence of MCC, to send forth his vision. It is a fitting benefit for MCC and a fitting tribute to Labute that we get to see the underpinnings of his piercing characters from this early work. Bravo.
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