The play was not well received in NY when it opened. It’s not the vision of how we, as a nation, reacted that people wanted to look at; but it’s an excellent metaphor for how we do behave in great and small ways every day. This is what our company loves about Neil LaBute’s plays and why we return to them. There are sides to humanity that are hard to see in ourselves but Labute’s characters are so human, so grounded in the same mundane wants that we all have, that you find yourself empathizing with them even as you dislike what they are doing. His characters justify extreme and out of proportion acts because of the kinds of everyday desires, fears, and prejudices we all harbor. What human tragedy isn’t an out of proportion response to small, petty, every day drives? Who hasn’t overlooked the harms they do, great and small, when they are feeding their own internal neediness? The play looked at selfishness using this large scale event, but ultimately was about how these people treated other people, including each other, every day. LaBute’s characters respond to the same kinds impulses that we all do, and like all of us do at some point, can’t see past themselves. Pain, death and sorrow not their own just doesn’t register.

By the time we were ready to do this the profiteering from the event was transitioning into the profit to be made by going to war. We were fascinated by the parallels and excited about taking on these characters. But then rehearsals began. The first few weeks Jud and I could hardly get through a few hours. It was exhausting and numbing and left us lying on the floor depressed every night. My daughter tried to help me with lines but after 30 pages gave up because it was too much like fighting with each other. Lowell didn’t allow us to dissolve into yelling or easy sarcasm and holding all that tension without release for so long made us all feel tense and thin. I think we were all the more careful to be kind to each other during this show because we all felt so