Bash: Latter-Day Plays

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Bash: Latter-Day Plays is a collection of three dark one act plays written by Neil LaBute. The play premiered at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater in New York City on June 24, 1999 and featured a performance by Calista Flockhart.

It later made its West End theatre premiere on January 10, 2007 at the Trafalgar Studio 2, directed by Tamara Harvey and starring Harry Lloyd, Juliet Rylance, David Sturzaker and Jodie Whittaker.

Several (perhaps all) of the play's main characters are Mormon, a religion LaBute espoused before receiving religious discipline (disfellowship) due to the defamatory nature of this play. He has since left the church.

The play runs for 100 minutes, with no intermission.

[edit] "Iphigenia in Orem"

The eponymous Iphigenia of the play is a baby girl who is suffocated by her father while she is asleep in her parents' bed. The man, who unwittingly has become the victim of a practical joke by one of his workmates, sacrifices his daughter for a higher standard of living when he takes at face value his colleague's news that he is going to be dismissed.

The play is a monologue addressed to an imaginary chance acquaintance in a hotel room where the man has stopped during a business trip some years after the baby's murder. It takes the form of a reluctant confession which is heavily interspersed with the murderer's rationalizations for his deed.

[edit] "A Gaggle of Saints"

Two attractive college-age adults, a boy and a girl, alternately address the audience, never speaking to each other. They relate the superficial details of a fancy dress party which they attended together. During the coure of the monologue, the boy describes coming across two middle-aged gay lovers in central park with his friends. In the name of religious sanctity, the boys follow one of the men into a public bathroom and savagely beat him to death. Once passed out, one of the boys slams his foot into the gay man's face- pushing his nose up into his brain. Another slams a metal trash can onto the the dead corpse after quietly saying the word "fag". The boys then say a prayer to God for the sake of the gay man's soul and leave (without the homeless man sleeping in the corner having ever woken up.) Afterwards, the boys realize that they are covered in the man's blood so they tell the girls that they were wrestling. They all have breakfast and take a train home without they girls ever realizing what had happened.

[edit] "Medea Redux"

A middle-aged woman sits alone at a table, describing a sexual relationship she had, at thirteen, with her junior high school English teacher. Later as she struggles, young, pregnant and alone, she idealizes and protects her former lover, refusing to judge him. Eventually she takes her young child to meet his father, who is married and has no children. The woman then describes how she murdered her former lover, without giving the audience any clear motive for the act.

In the televised movie version, the woman murders her child because she knows that it will cause her former teacher pain even though it is clear from her descriptions that she also dearly loves her child.