Product Description

A startling dissection of cruelty and artistic creation from the author of In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors

In a modern version of Adam's seduction by Eve, The Shape of Things pits gentle, awkward, overweight Adam against experienced, analytical, amoral Evelyn, a graduate student in art. After a chance meeting at a museum, Evelyn and Adam embark on an intense relationship that causes shy and principled Adam to go to extraordinary lengths, including cosmetic surgery, and a betrayal of his best friend, to improve his appearance and character. In the process, Evelyn's subtle and insistent coaching results in a reconstruction of Adam's fundamental moral character. Only in a final and shocking exhibition does Evelyn reveal the nature of her interest in Adam, of her detached artist's perspective and sense of authority--to her, Adam is no more than "flesh.... one of the most perfect materials on earth. Natural, beautiful, and malleable." Labute's latest work is an intense and disturbing study not only of the uses of power within human relationships, but also of the ethics involved in the relationship of art and life. To what extent is an artist licensed to shape and change her medium or to alter the work of another artist? What is acceptable artistic material? At what point does creation become manipulation, and at what point does creation destroy? Or, is the new Adam, handsome and confident if heart broken, an admirable result of the most challenging artistic endeavor? The Shape of Things challenges society's most deeply entrenched ideas about art, manipulation, and love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #442460 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780571212460
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Neil Labute is the author of In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbours, and Bash.

Customer Reviews

"Fear No Art?"
Several years ago, PBS distributed to subscribers a particularly annoying, idiotic button announcing that with-it people "Fear No Art." Even though such heralded types as Plato and Tolstoy had worried about the artist's frightening power to create as well as to wreak havoc on the social order, PBS thought it knew better. Artists these days are basically nice people, it held, and thus they will necessarily use their powers of self-expression only to enrich the lives of everyone in society. Consequently, we must be open to and accepting of whatever an artist comes up with - even a crucifix in a bottle of urine - lest we be thought narrow-minded or indeed intolerant. Neil Labute looking at the current scene with wide open eyes challenges the complacency in this conventional thinking about the "nice" artist and life. In "The Shape Of Things," he vividly brings home to us the truth in Jonathan Swift's observation that "nice people are full of nasty ideas." Set among campus Me-First postmoderns who delve into art and engage in tangled "relationships," Labute's play gives its characters free rein to reveal themselves as both pathetically and hilariously stunted human specimens. Their seeming one-dimensionality is by satiric design, as are those hints of rage and clueless meanness which occasionally ooze out from beneath their laid-back surfaces to enrich the key moments of dramatic encounter. Like many of the sardonic Ibsen's characters, Labute's too have snarling trolls lurking just beneath their "nice," ever so tolerant, "non-judgmental" public selves. Most significantly, his charismatic, rebellious central female figure, her inner person reduced wholly and subhumanly to warped aesthetic concerns, emerges as a satiric embodiment of the postmodern artist as essentially destructive creator.
To any mainstream critic who goes to plays and demands "positive" or "compassionate" endorsements of the received ideas we hold or our self-absorbed lives as we generally live them now, Labute has little to offer. Refreshingly free of such frothy, mindless cheer, the playwright instead skewers unquestioned contemporary notions of art's necessary beneficence and those of the glories of untrammeled individualism. Human nature and art, he reveals as satiric dramatist, are both larger and more problematic than such currently genteel, fashionable conceptions of them. Far from being "non-original" in his ideas, Labute more than any other current playwright provokingly calls into question the actual - not the putative - received ideas about art and life which are thought "cutting edge" in our time. If anyone writing drama today could produce a fully realized masterwork on the way we live now, I suspect it would be Neil Labute.

Old forms in bright new clothes.
Adam is an amiable and literate loser and virtual virgin who needs two jobs to pay for his student loans. Working as a security guard at a gallery, he tries to dissuade Evelyn, an Art postgraduate, from defacing one of the exhibits, and ends up going out with her. Not only does he start enjoying 'great' sex for the first time, but, under Evelyn's supervision, he begins eating and dressing better, working out, even getting a nose job, to the point where the former scruffy prole becomes what his best friend's fiancee calls a 'babe'. Adam had been too shy to ask the latter out before, but now they kiss and go for a 'drive' in the 'woods'. Meanwhile Evelyn has her thesis showcase to organise.

For all its appeals to modernity and student culture - post-modern art; makeovers; facial surgery; college; swearing; studenty soundtrack - 'The Shape Of Things' is surprisingly traditional fare, not too removed from the well-made plays of Terence Rattigan, or Shaw's dramas of ideas (Evelyn becomes Higgins to Adam's Eliza Doolittle), in which every element and loose end is neatly tied up. Each character represents a particular point-of-view (check out, for a start, those names), which is modified or developed as the thesis continues - each vignette proceeds intellectually, leading to a climax in which the leads declaim their positions at wordy length. This means that the character interplay, though present and involving, lacks the true forcefulness of a work like 'Your Friends And Neighbours'.

Behind the players are projected images from Western civilisation's visual treatment of the human body, from antiquity to anatomy to Magritte. This might seem to be pretentious padding, an attempt to add spurious depth to what is basically a sour college romance, but it actually works with the drama to achieve the devastating pay-off of The Revelation.

To be honest, Labute's ideas - about the impoverishment of post-modern art; the consequences of 'art for art's sake', or the crossing the line between life and art; about a culture that privileges image over decency, self-consciousness over relationships; the dangers of 'too much' civilisation or sophistication; the alienation (oh yes) of one's life as it is mediated by life, art and the media - aren't very original, though paradoxical enough to avoid seeming static. What is more enjoyable is the way the famous male monstrosity that characterised Labute's earlier work (e.g. 'In The Company Of Men'), has been transferred to a female character, whose spectacular callousness has you cheering her on in spite of yourself, and chills the post-'Nurse Betty' sentimental streak the playwright has difficulty in suppressing. The dialogue is as sharp, suggestive and funny as ever, with a great line about Picasso. And, yes, it's nice to see people like me on a stage for once.

unoriginal, uninspired rehashing of better works
I had high hopes for this play. The things I had heard about it were very complimentary. However, what I found was a lame, uninspired work which toyed with interesting concepts but did not devote enough depth or orginality to any of them. Also, I found that it ripped off many classic works of art: Frankenstein, My Fair Lady, and so on.

Let's start with the reversal of the Adam and Eve in garden of Eden scenario. This is an an obvious parallel, given the names of the two main characters. Only in this case, Adam, not Eve, is victim to temptation. What juicy subject matter to explore, but with Labute's weak characters it never gets off of the ground.

Then there is the what is art/postmodern art argument. Evelyn is a sociopath, not an artist. Her big act of rebellion in the first act of defacing the male sculpture is like an immature high school student's act of rebellion. She spray paints a penis over the sculture's covered genitals--um, ok. Dumb. So, to argue on the subjects of art and ethics, one must first begin with an ARTIST, not a cold, void, pretentious bitch like Evelyn. Her victim, or project, Adam, is so gullable and weak that the reader can't possibly sympathize.

Anyway, it is readable, but largely a vapid commentary on postmodern art that lacks passion and attention to detail.