The Shape Of Things

This play can be viewed as heavy-handed if one wishes to see it that way. One can assume that the play is simply about the nature of art and relationships. That isn't the main issue of the play. The play forces the perceptive viewer to address the meta-ethical question of whether there can be some sort objective morality to life. If one doesn't believe in an objective morality then one cannot hate 'Jenny' but simply disagree with what she did (if that!). The ultimate question this play forces one to confront is whether one can believe in an objective morality after god has died. Unless a reader may assume I am a christian raging against godless, immoral, post-modernist, I don't believe in god or in an objective morality (not that I'm a relativist). Jenny could morally justify her actions in many different ethical systems, but not in any deistic systems. This play is superbly subtle if one has enough patience to see it through to the end and really think about it.

I have seen the movie so many times then decided to buy the book. The movie is of course after the book since the book is really a play/screenplay. I thought it was great. It added so much more depth. I am in love with the movie. I am in love with the book. Do not pass it up! its a must read!

OK...I read this book in college in acting class b/c we were going to perform the play...first of all, its a very easy and enjoyable read...its about these four college kids...2 couples...this one guys girlfriend seems a little mysterious at times...he is severely whipped, like most other college guys with girlfriends, OK so he's a little more whipped than most people...anyway I read the book and was like, "OK this is just a story about everyday life, nothing unusual at all, sounds like a lot of other people I know," and then at the end you are like "HOLY $***!" At least I was, some people say they knew what was going to happen but I didn't see it coming...and here's the best/worst part: Labute has things happen in this book where you kinda know what happened but not exactly...it will drive you crazy...you will want to know what was said...what happened...I've been kind of obsessing over the story the past couple weeks, and I often find myself wondering, "What would have happened if Adam hadn't done this, or if he had done that..." I would really like to ask Labute a few questions, but I am sure he wouldn't tell me anything b/c that would kind of ruin the whole point. I found I could really relate to the characters, it seemed very realistic to me, like Labute was a kid once too...except of course, for what happens at the end...I was shocked that this person would do this! What did they do? You must read it to find out...and read the book before seeing the movie...they are very similar but I think it's more fun that way and I noticed some very important things that were in the book but not in the movie and vise-versa.

I've always admired the work of Labute, but admittedly never got around to reading or seeing "The Shape of Things." Needless to say, then, when I finally did get to read it, I began with high expectations. And these expectations were met. "Shape of Things" is a startlingly crisp and wittily written piece that examines the form of "art" and just how far it can be taken. Without a doubt, this is an artist's play, and certainly one of the most groundbreaking dramas of recent years. The end will knock your socks off... particularly if you don't see what's coming!

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.