The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute, directed by Alex Papps. Designed by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Stelios Karagiannis, sound by Alex Papps and Mike Levi. With Jane Badler and Simon Wood. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Red Stitch, until March 8. Bookings: (03) 9533 8083

Neil LaBute takes on the persona of the gritty, macho American playwright (as patented by David Mamet) bigtime. He is a controversialist, a Mormon who was “disfellowshipped” (the stage before being excommunicated) for his negative portrayals of the faithful, and is a prominent member of the "new wave" of US playwrights. In a typical flourish of rhetoric, in which he claimed more or less that American playwriting had lost its balls, LaBute recently accused most writers of being “pussies”.

"We sit back and watch the world go by, writing down the things we find funny or sad while trying to make a buck off it," he said. "We use our lives, or the lives of others, for personal gain, and we defend it by saying it's 'in the public domain' or 'true', and therefore OK to slop around in someone else's pain."

It’s a statement which calls up the ambivalence I feel towards LaBute. He uncovers a certain (partial) truth that writers would do well to remember; on the other hand, the implied sexualised tone of the criticism (you can be sure that LaBute isn’t referring to felines when he says writers are pussies) underlines a macho posturing that is difficult, as it were, to swallow.

I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse LaBute of writing misogynistic plays (others have), but the line between portraying misogyny and endorsing it can be perilously thin. And his plays can get uncomfortably close to blaming feminism and the supposed rise of the strong, autonomous woman for disempowering men, identifying women as the real cause of bad male behaviour.

As LaBute says, “I make trouble for a living”. I share LaBute’s open admiration for playwrights like Caryl Churchill, Howard Barker and Harold Pinter, and admire his bracing desire to ruffle some feathers among the certainties of comfortable American liberalism. But I sometimes suspect that ruffling these feathers takes the mildest of breezes.

In other words, is LaBute the radical force he claims to be? Certainly not on the evidence of The Mercy Seat, a play that bruised some sensitivities because it deals with the aftermath of 9/11 and takes issue with the rhetoric of heroism that surrounded that catastrophe. It was one of the first theatrical responses to the terrorist attacks, and on its premiere in New York in 2002 it no doubt had a resonance that it signally lacks in Melbourne in 2008.

As LaBute describes it, The Mercy Seat focuses “on the selfish acts of my protagonist on a day that most Americans still want to believe was filled with heroism and personal sacrifice. Bullshit. …That day did indeed see many heroic acts, but not everybody who died was a saint, and a good many people felt the ol' US of A finally got what was coming.”

On the surface, the premise is intriguing. Ben Harcourt (Simon Wood) is a married man who is having an affair with his boss, Abby Prescott (Jane Badler). When the Twin Towers were attacked, he was supposed to be inside; but instead he skipped work and headed over to Abby’s place for a swift head job. But the earth moved in rather unexpected ways, leaving the apartment covered in a thin layer of dust and both Ben and Abby shocked and dazed.

The play opens a day later. Ben is still at Abby’s apartment, hiding out. His first response to the disaster is to see it as an opportunity: it’s a chance to leave his wife and children without the mess of painful explanations and to make a run for a new life (or, as he has it, to “walk into the sunset”). He is refusing to answer the frantic calls from his family, who believe he is among the dead. Narcissistic, inarticulate and irredeemably selfish, Ben is revealed to be that classic LaBute creation, a jerk.

On the other hand, the terrorist attacks prompt Abby – shocked, but only up to a point, by Ben’s self-interested response to the deaths of thousands of people – to question some of the verities that have driven her life. This doesn’t prevent her from being seduced by the fantasy of beginning again with a clean slate, the chance to sweep away the lies and start afresh. But the self-revelation that is the engine of this kind of play has a twist that she doesn’t expect.

The central mystery is why a seemingly smart woman would spend more than a single night with this man, whom at one point she claims is merely “a piece of ass”. He is a particularly unimaginative lover, who in three years of enthusiastic bonking has never once looked her in the face, and whose erotic inventiveness is limited to banging her from behind and a little oral sex. (She is so bored she makes shopping lists during the act). Does she put up with him because she’s unconsciously expiating some feminine guilt about earning more money than he does? On the other hand, why is he so obsessed with a woman who is either a mass of spikes or a swamp of neediness?

Who knows? Who cares? I lost interest pretty early on as a certain familiar depression settled over what’s loosely known as my aesthetic senses. The conversation continues in real time, with a bunch of predictably unpredictable revelations and the familiar diversionary monologues that expose the characters’ “real” thoughts, cranking up the emotional mechanics in ways that recall American television or film conventions more than the radical unexpectedness of, say, a Pinter or a Barker.

It’s easy to map the personal onto the political here: the national self-absorption that is blind to the suffering of others, even the suffering of its own; the corrupt corporate ambition that rewards success above all, no matter what it takes to get there. As Ben says: ''I always take the easy route, do it faster, simpler, you know, whatever it takes to get done, be liked, get by. That's me. Cheated in school . . . took whatever I could get from whomever I could take it from.''

But somehow all these metaphorical speculations end up feeling banal: it's full of ideas that are legibly signalled but that fail to lodge at any intellectual or emotional depth. There’s something important missing that I can’t quite put my finger on, although I think it comes down to a certain formal slackness, a lack of theatrical poetic and linguistic excitement. Put The Mercy Seat next to, say, Sarah Kane's Blasted or Pinter's The Homecoming, and it practically goes miaow with pussiness. And without this sense of poetic, the work isn't much more than a low-octane version of the battle of the sexes exemplified in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

It’s not the fault of Alex Papps’s production, which features a beautiful design by Peter Mumford that exploits the claustrophobic intimacy of the space: an ordinary living room covered with a thin layer of dust with the shadows of objects painted on the walls, an uneasy allusion to the shadows that imprinted walls when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Backstage a wide doorway opens onto darkness, a nice metaphor for the emptiness of the lives portrayed here.

Jane Badler and Simon Wood work hard, and produce creditable performances that never quite manage to transcend the limitations of the play. Wood has the harder job: portraying a character who at times verges on the catatonic can sometimes result in a catatonic performance, and he doesn’t always escape this danger. Badler manages the spiky vulnerability without revealing what exists underneath the spikes. There’s a fair bit of aimless prowling around the apartment, but I guess you have to do something with a play which is basically two talking heads. It’s a longish 90 minutes.

A cryptic version of this review appears in today's Australian.

Serendipity rules. Hot on the heels of a debate in the comments on my review of Bell Shakespeare's Othello, in which Anon outlined his objections to an Aboriginal Othello and his regret at the passing of blackfaced, classically-trained white actors, Mr Excitement alerts me to a Los Angeles Times article by US playwright Neil LaBute in which he calls for "colourblind" casting. "In these troubled times," opines Mr LaBute, "the man [Olivier] would never be allowed to put on blackface and play that role. Hell, he wouldn't be allowed to perform it if he went out in a strawberry-blond wig and clown makeup."

LaBute finishes up appealing to the imaginative autonomy of theatre, an argument with which I have some sympathy.

This is not an argument about opportunity or imbalance; all I'm asking is that you let the theater, that last bastion of illusion — a place of magic and hope and imagination — remain exactly that. The stuff that dreams are made of.

But the fact remains that theatre is an impure art, deeply embedded in its time and place, and LaBute's appeal reflects - as several others point out - his own privileged time, place and social position, and not the transcendent and universalist notion of Art that he seems to claim. As you might imagine, his article stirred up a nest of hornets, one of the stingiest being Asian-American blogger Bamboo Nation.

LaBute seems to think that one of the creative community's greatest travesties of justice is that Brad Pitt can't paint his face black and star in A Raisin in the Sun. Is this what we're really concerned about in the arts? In reference to Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface in the 1960s, LaBute laments, "In these troubled times, the man would never be allowed to put on blackface and play that role." I know, Neil, and while we're at it I might add that, in these troubled times, we would also never be allowed to have racial segregation and have people use different drinking fountains.

It also sparked a bunch of angry letters to the LA Times, including this doozy from LA actor/writer Ken Narasaki:

Neil LaBute's made a living as a misogynist (and misanthropic) playwright, skewering "political correctness" by asserting his right, as an angry male, to be a jerk. I suppose it was simply a matter of time before he decided to stand up for white actors against their colored oppressors. After all, who can argue that "when great actors are denied great roles on the stage because of their skin color, there's a problem"?...

White people have played people of color for generations, and look what they've done: For every Olivier, there are dozens of Mickey Rooneys; for every Othello, there are hundreds of minstrel shows, Charlie Chans, Mikados.

I too wish for a day when our stages could be truly colorblind. Maybe that'll be commonplace in American theater in our lifetimes, and maybe then American theater truly could be called American theater. But for now, I'd have to say that the "caste system" in American theater is still very firmly in place, and white actors are most definitely not on the bottom.

Which all-in-all gives a pretty fascinating glimpse into racial politics in US theatre. I'm quite certain there are parallels here, while at the same time I can't help thinking that there are crucial differences. One being, for example, the specificity of Indigenous experience in contemporary Australia.

However, to get back to theatre: it got me thinking about whether it would be at all possible now to cast a white actor as Othello. I hesitate to claim it would be impossible - art has a way of instantly disproving sweeping statements - but it would be, to say the least, very difficult. Quite apart from the question of so-called PC sensitivities, it couldn't but look ridiculous to contemporary audiences - something the RSC seemed to recognise, for instance, by not performing the play on its main stage between 1985 and 1999, because it wasn't prepared to black up a white actor. Social mores change, and theatre conventions change with them.

And thinking back, the only time I've seen blackface on stage recently was in Russell Dykstra's outrageously offensive piss-take of Australian racism in Michael Watts' Not Like Beckett. And in that performance, blackface was instantly recognisable as the code of an outmoded racism (I'm not saying that racism is outmoded, sadly; simply that the cossies change). It's hard to see it working in any serious performance. I'm curious to hear further thoughts...