![Posted by MCC Playwright-in-Residence, Neil LaBute—Filthy Talk for Troubled Times came out of my graduate work in Kansas, a collection of scenes and monologues that now seem influenced by everyone from Mr. Mamet to Mr. Shepard to my dad when he had a few drinks in him. Wallace Shawn is in there, too, and hopefully a bit of Christopher Durang (I used to eat his work for breakfast) and probably a dozen others. It was around this time that I had discovered the modern English playwrights as well and their freewheeling sense of structure was a big part of my creative life at the time so a quick tip of the hat to Barker-Bond-Brenton-Churchill-Hare-Pinter-Storey-et al is necessary. And yet, there is the obvious beginning of a ‘me’ stuffed in there also, if only in the margins. Actually, many of the same themes that I continue to write about today—betrayal, gender politics, the isolation of the individual even in close-knit groups, the numbing death that is the workplace, etc.)—are represented in this early work. I also still find a lot of it funny and even a little bit true. It was the first play of mine that got some regional attention and productions would pop up all around the country during the next ten years or so. I didn’t make a lot of money from it but it was the play that made me start to feel like a writer (although I still feel funny putting that on the ‘occupation’ line of most applications or travel documents. I don’t know why). As for my work, I continue to love the monologue form and characters without names and dialogue that overlaps and employs ellipses and for those reasons alone I hope it will be of at least casual interest to the average theatergoer (and the fact that someone once yelled “Kill the playwright!” at me during a production in New York [my Off-Off-Broadway debut] so I almost died for my art because of this play. Sort of.)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l34zw9PUYy1qaaxe7o1_r1_500.gif)
Posted by MCC Playwright-in-Residence, Neil LaBute—
Filthy Talk for Troubled Times came out of my graduate work in Kansas, a collection of scenes and monologues that now seem influenced by everyone from Mr. Mamet to Mr. Shepard to my dad when he had a few drinks in him. Wallace Shawn is in there, too, and hopefully a bit of Christopher Durang (I used to eat his work for breakfast) and probably a dozen others. It was around this time that I had discovered the modern English playwrights as well and their freewheeling sense of structure was a big part of my creative life at the time so a quick tip of the hat to Barker-Bond-Brenton-Churchill-Hare-Pinter-Storey-et al is necessary. And yet, there is the obvious beginning of a ‘me’ stuffed in there also, if only in the margins. Actually, many of the same themes that I continue to write about today—betrayal, gender politics, the isolation of the individual even in close-knit groups, the numbing death that is the workplace, etc.)—are represented in this early work. I also still find a lot of it funny and even a little bit true. It was the first play of mine that got some regional attention and productions would pop up all around the country during the next ten years or so. I didn’t make a lot of money from it but it was the play that made me start to feel like a writer (although I still feel funny putting that on the ‘occupation’ line of most applications or travel documents. I don’t know why). As for my work, I continue to love the monologue form and characters without names and dialogue that overlaps and employs ellipses and for those reasons alone I hope it will be of at least casual interest to the average theatergoer (and the fact that someone once yelled “Kill the playwright!” at me during a production in New York [my Off-Off-Broadway debut] so I almost died for my art because of this play. Sort of.)
