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Neil LaBute meets September 11
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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The Mercy Seat
By Neil LaBute. Directed by Eric C. Engel. Set by Brynna Bloomfield. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Lighting by Eleanor Moore. With Paula Plum and Robert Pemberton. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through April 17.
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No one but the bard of amoral opportunism, Neil LaBute, would see September 11 as the Great Escape. But in his play The Mercy Seat, which is being given a crackling New England premiere by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, LaBute once again demonstrates his willingness to look the American underbelly straight in its mean navel without blinking. The play is not ultimately credible, but it is unflinching in its examination of an adulterous pair who were having an early-morning quickie in Lower Manhattan when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Horrified yet enterprising, they look at the carnage on the TV screen and see both catastrophe and "Open Sesame." The married Ben was supposed to have been in the Towers on business. So, should he make like E.T. and call home? Or might he and the mistress take this chance to vamoose and start over, free of the messy strings of responsibility? Apart from the troublesome truths that no one would seriously argue children are better off surviving a dead dad than a broken home and that the couple looking to ride off into the sunset don’t even seem to want to sit on the same horse, it’s an intriguing premise. LaBute’s is the brain behind the unabashedly cynical 1997 film In the Company of Men. He is also the author of the plays bash, a calm examination of terrible crimes committed by ordinary people who happen to be Mormon, and The Shape of Things (which also became a film), which is about a ruthless art student who turns her malleable boyfriend into a sort of human master’s thesis. LaBute is not, in these and other works, a chronicler of the high end of our shared humanity. Neither are Wall Street colleagues turned hot-and-heavy bedmates Ben Harcourt and Abby Prescott of The Mercy Seat entirely admirable citizens of a world in crisis, though certainly his behavior, both actual and contemplated, is more deplorable than hers. (Only in The Shape of Things does LaBute make the woman the hard nut.) When The Mercy Seat, which by the playwright’s admission was written in an outpouring, debuted Off Broadway in 2002, the roles were given star power by Liev Schreiber and Sigourney Weaver. In London in 2003, the excellent Irish actress Sinéad Cusack played Abby, who is not only Ben’s decade-older mistress but also his boss. Here, in the Lyric production, beloved local diva Paula Plum brings both vulnerability and a prizefighter’s punch to the badgering but at least outraged and humane Abby. Robert Pemberton salvages the more difficult, myopic Ben with sincere floundering and an unrelenting willingness to step up to the plate of his mediocrity. Explosive yet boyish, he also brandishes credible sex appeal, without which Abby would seem a masochist ready for The Story of O. Moreover, under Eric C. Engel’s telling direction, Plum shapes her performance in such a way that one can believe, if one chooses, that her entire gambit is a determined effort to drive Ben to the brink of decency, whatever the cost to both of them. The Biblically named play takes place in the early morning, 20 hours after the planes hit the Towers. Ben is huddled zombie-like on a couch in Abby’s downtown loft, with the tragic events unfolding on both a silent flat-screen TV and the rubble-strewn street below. Seemingly unattached to his conscious being, an arm extends, its hand cradling a relentlessly ringing cell phone. Abby enters with a few groceries, her scarf and coat sprinkled with debris. Underneath her sarcasm and his numbness is the elephant in the room: his proposal of the night before that he pretend to be dead and the two escape to Arizona or the Bahamas. The whole thing’s a bit preposterous — who would really find more nobility in the self-administered equivalent of the Witness Protection Program than in simple divorce? That is, unless you assume that Ben does not so much desire to escape to a life with Abby as abdicate from his own. If she wants to accompany him, bringing along an extant identity, higher income-earning power, usable credit cards, and pliable thighs, well, fine. In his preface to The Mercy Seat, LaBute describes the play as an examination of "how selfishness can still exist during a moment of national selflessness." Indeed, such candid dissection is this work’s greatest strength. But LaBute, who also identifies The Mercy Seat as a "relationship play," doesn’t make a case for Ben and Abby as a couple: stolen nookie at corporate conferences and a nice weekend in Vermont do not provide sufficient tender counterpoint to what appears to be the hostility and the contempt that drive the affair. Moreover, the writing veers from strident cliché to florid passages like Abby’s assertion that during endless episodes of doggy-style sex she watches her life flash before her "on a giant headboard in the devil’s bedroom." It is to the production’s credit that, for all the holes in this Lucifer’s boudoir of solipsism at Ground Zero, the actors conjure sympathy for their bedevilment.
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