EURIPIDES REVISITED; WHAT DO A MORMON WRITER, TWO GREEK PLAYS AND ALLY MCBEAL HAVE IN COMMON?

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

You might say that it's all Greek to Neil LaBute: infanticide, sexual betrayal, human sacrifice, homicidal revenge and erotically frenzied group-killing sprees.

Those are some of the stomach-churning subjects to be found in LaBute's ``bash, latter day plays,'' the trinity of one-act dramas starring Calista Flockhart, Paul Rudd and Ron Eldard that opened a three-week run Sunday night at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Audiences familiar with LaBute's two acclaimed, relentlessly nasty feature films, ``In the Company of Men'' and ``Your Friends and Neighbors'' likely won't be surprised by the ugly twists and turns of ``bash.'' Filled with men and, to a lesser extent, women behaving wretchedly, LaBute's films (he wrote and directed both) have been branded by some as ``misogynistic,'' ``homophobic'' and other equally unflattering epithets.

``Bash,'' in which two episodes of infant killings and a Central Park gay-bashing are recalled in excruciatingly vivid detail, probably will do little to change those viewers' minds.

Yet the gruesome events recounted in ``bash'' also happen to be essential plot elements in the dramas of such heavyweight classical Greek playwrights as Aeschylus, Sophocles and, especially, Euripides, the granddaddy of Western-style dramatic sensationalism.

What's that snickering? You're dubious that a hotshot Hollywood auteur would care about a couple of 2,400-year-old melodramas most people have never even read? Well, consider that two of the one-act playlets that make up ``bash'' - ``Medea Redux'' and ``Iphegenia in Orem'' - are Americanized '90s updatings of Euripides' ``Medea,'' written in 431 B.C., and ``Iphigenia in Tauris,'' written in 414 B.C.

However, LaBute hasn't just resurrected Euripides' plotlines. He also seems to have adopted the ancient playwright's cool, calmly objective way of looking at the most brutal and inexplicable of Homo sapien behavior, without passing moral judgment on it.

``It's almost a mathematic equation,'' says LaBute, explaining ``bash's'' chillingly deadpan point of view. `` `If you do this, then this will probably be the outcome.' I'm not going to say to you that that's bad behavior. I'm simply going to say, `That's what's going to happen.' ''

``And I think that sometimes is frustrating to an audience. I don't know that they want it, but they've been brought up expecting clear-cut kind of good, evil, beginning, middle, end. So when people confound that, it kind of throws them off a bit.''

The lack of a clear-cut moral is only one of the parallels between the Euripidean worldview and the worldview of ``bash,'' in which the extraordinary actions of otherwise ordinary people take on mythic proportions.

In ``Medea Redux,'' Flockhart has been strategically cast against her sitcom prototype as the sophisticated urban-yuppie Ally McBeal.

Here she plays a young, semi-educated Midwestern woman whose love affair with her former junior high school teacher has ended in disaster. Sitting alone beneath a police interrogation lamp, she confesses to the string of events that led to an unexpected pregnancy, followed by her lover's rejection and her own horrifying retribution.

While her character's actions may appear extreme, the ``Ally McBeal'' star doesn't think so.

``It's a really complicated examination of the human psyche which leaves you aware of how fragile we all are - and how everybody is capable of anything, that no one is safe, no one is above it all,'' Flockhart said last summer prior to the show's New York opening.

LaBute concedes that he took a certain pleasure in casting Flockhart as a blue-collar murderer who chain-smokes and drops her ``g's'' when she talks.

``Calista, even more than Paul and Ron, probably, carries around this mantle of the all-American (girl), America's sweetheart, all those kinds of things, from `Ally McBeal,' '' he says. ``And the idea that she was sort of ferally jumping in, you know grabbing it (the role) by her teeth and saying, `I want to do something like this for my summer vacation,' really was enticing to me.''

Joe Mantello, who directed the original off-Broadway production of ``bash'' last summer, says New York audiences weren't surprised to see Flockhart in such a different role because they'd been watching her perform live theater for years before ``Ally McBeal.''

For L.A. audiences, he expects, the contrast will be more startling.

``It was like when Mary Tyler Moore did `Ordinary People,' and you had that kind of tension of this woman that everyone had such warmth and affection (for) in this really, really complicated and chilly role,'' Mantello says. ``I think there's a little bit of that here. And I think it's such a smart career move for her.''

``Medea Redux'' takes its name and its thematic cues from the Medea of Greek legend on whom Euripides based his play, a powerful princess who helped the hero Jason to procure the Golden Fleece. Later, when Jason threw Medea over for the Hellenic equivalent of a trophy wife, she gained revenge by murdering their sons.

``Iphegenia in Orem,'' the middle monologue of the ``bash'' triptych, is a contemporary spin on Euripides' play named for the daughter of a Greek king and queen who was offered as a sacrifice to the gods when the Greeks set sail to conquer Troy.

In LaBute's version, the infant sacrifice is offered to the great god of American capitalism by a midlevel Utah sales manager (Eldard) desperate to climb the corporate ladder (Orem is a small city in north central Utah, near Provo). The deceptively bland, boyishly likable executive relates his misdeed to an unseen acquaintance in a Las Vegas hotel room, which is bathed in a murky evening light.

The third playlet, ``A Gaggle of Saints,'' involves a pair of college sweethearts (Flockhart and Rudd) attending a black-tie bash at New York's Plaza Hotel. In this vignette, LaBute's references aren't to Greek mythology but to the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve. At one point, Rudd's character compares the couple to the first man and woman, frolicking innocently in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. The garden, in this case, is Central Park, and the forbidden fruit is the man's violently repressed homosexuality.

Despite the play's pointed literary allusions, neither LaBute nor director Mantello wants to make too much of ``bash's'' highbrow dramatic roots.

``For me as a director, going into rehearsal, I have to let those things exist for the audience or not,'' Mantello says, ``but it's impossible for me to walk into a room and say, `Now, let's compare this and contrast that with ``Medea.'' ' ''

What the production team did want to emphasize was theater's ancient storytelling origins: the blind poet reciting verse around the open campfire, the medicine man pumping up the tribe with heroic tales of ancestral exploits.

Consequently, design elements were pared down. Scott Pask's sets are simple, consisting only of a few pieces of furniture. Actors' movements are minimal; for the most part, the three performers just sit and talk to the audience.

``The one conscious decision that I made when I started directing this was I wanted it to be about restraint, and I wanted to see how little we could get away with,'' Mantello says. ``I wanted to see if actually an actor could sit at a table and talk to an audience or to an imaginary character on stage, and not move, and in the storytelling of it keep your attention and keep the tension of the piece.''

LaBute, who names as influences the American playwrights David Mamet and Wallace Shawn and modern British dramatists Edward Bond, Howard Brenton and Caryl Churchill, said he wanted ``bash'' to be primarily about actors and language.

``It's for me what I like best about theater, which relies mainly on words and actors conveying those words,'' he says. ``So in that sense they (the plays) are quite classic.''

It's an ironic facet of his still-young career that LaBute, a practicing Mormon who studied at Brigham Young University, has been perceived in some quarters as morally flippant. (Three of the four characters in ``bash'' are Mormons, as are many of the characters in LaBute's films.)

``I think a lot of people got hung up on the brutality of these plays and the brutality of his films,'' says Mantello. ``I think people make the mistake of attributing the events of the play to something that the writer sort of endorses.''

Yet if LaBute isn't condoning his characters' repellent behavior, it doesn't follow that he's condemning it either. As a writer working in a society that gorges itself on a daily diet of murder, mayhem and tabloid-style intrigue, and which rushes to judgment in the span of a CNN news cycle, you can see why LaBute prefers taking the long view - all the way back to Euripides.

``That's why a thing like a Columbine (high school massacre) will have that kind of resonance for a long time,'' he says. ``Not only the act is so atrocious, but what motivated the act - what specifically on that day said, `Let's go do this.'

And so those kind of questions, the why, always haunts us. And so I think as a writer that's one of your great tools, is to provide not just one answer but many possible answers, and none of those in fact may be the case in the end. I'm just quite drawn to that.''

The facts

What: ``bash, latter day plays''

Where: Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills.

When: Through Dec. 19. Performances at 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays.

Tickets: $60 to $75. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1 -- cover -- color) HARDLY `BASH'-FUL

Calista Flockhart helps put filmmaker Neil LaBute's searing vision on stage

(2) Paul Rudd and Calista Flockhart star in ``A Gaggle of Saints,'' the third in the one-act trilogy, ``bash, latter day plays'' at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills.

(3) ``It's almost a mathematic equation: If you do this, then this will probably be the outcome. I'm not going to say to you that that's bad behavior. I'm simply going to say, `That's what's going to happen.' ''

Neil LaBute

Playwright, ``bash''