Some Velvet Morning - Neil Labute

This play does the thing of making two people in a single room for a whole play seem interesting, which I always admire. It resembles Blackbird in some ways, because it's about an older man and a younger woman who had a relationship in the past and the man has showed up to try and rekindle it.

Labute gets a lot of mileage out of mundane things, like names and phone calls and small looks. He also gets really sexually explicit at unexpected moments, which keeps you on your toes a little bit.

Spoiler Alert: I guess the big things about this play are that it's two people talking and that there's a twist. So first it builds to this really gruesome rape scene, but then it's revealed that the rape was staged, the whole thing was role play, and the woman was in on it the whole time.

I really struggled with this turn because to me it felt like it undercut everything I had just watched, and like the whole human drama was sacrificed at the altar as a commentary on theater and maybe voyeurism.

I don't know, I guess it was a real shock, and that's a good thing. But also it felt a little like it exploited the concept of rape and the inherent drama there. I think that's probably a surface level interpretation of the play but it was my immediate reaction. It can also probably be argued that it did the opposite, it empowered this woman by suggesting that her vulnerability was just an act and that she was in fact exploiting this man.

I think maybe the thing I liked most about this was it just made me really think a lot about how I was supposed to feel and like, what Labute wanted to say. A lot of plays have more obvious messages/ morals/ mood inducers than this one did. And I appreciated that a lot, and I appreciate it about all Labute plays.