Filthy Talk for Troubled Times: And Other Plays - Softcover

Praise for Neil LaBute

"The reigning prince of Off Broadway." --David Amsden, New York

"LaBute [is] the dark shining star of stage and film morality." --Linda Winer, Newsday

"There is something of the sinister menace of Pinter in LaBute's work (along with David Mamet, he is very much the heir apparent to that master)." --Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

"A connoisseur of unsettling emotion . . . LaBute's psychological terrain is the punishing slippery slope of ambivalence. In his hands, this bedeviling state of spiritual stasis comes with a distinctive sound, a sensational hemming and hawing, which poetically betrays the mind boxing clever with itself." --John Lahr, The New Yorker

"Like a giant, mischievous child poking a dog with a stick, Neil LaBute delights in seeing what he can get away with. [He's] the bad boy of American theater . . . Dangerous and devastatingly funny." --Jumana Farouky, Time

"LaBute['s] judgment of his fellow men makes the Old Testament Jehovah look like a softie . . . his talents go beyond glibly vicious storytelling and extend into thoughtful analyses of a world rotten with original sin." --Ben Brantley, The New York Times

"There is no playwright on the planet these days who is writing better than Neil LaBute." --John Lahr, The New Yorker

Neil LaBute burst onto the American theater scene in 1989 with his controversial debut work Filthy Talk for Troubled Times. Set in a barroom in Anytown USA and populated by a series of everymen (and two beleaguered everywomen), this series of frank exchanges explores the innumerable varieties of American intolerance. A unique snapshot of the times, the play seldom allowed production by the author since provides a compelling look at the early thinking and evolution of one of our great theater artists.
Also in this collection is a series of new, short works, some never before produced. They include The New Testament,” a showbiz satire that takes a close look at the perils of color-blind casting, and The Furies,” in which a woman helps navigate her brother’s breakup with his out-and-then-perhaps, in-the-closet-again lover.