A solitary young woman sits on a chair, fidgeting, smoking, trying to ease her way into telling a painfully difficult story. And she meanders, as if she were trying to avoid the point she is simultaneously struggling to reach. And gradually, the secrets pour out, beginning with the day when she was 13 and she went on a school trip to a maritime centre.
And she's talking about observing the sharks and how she and her teacher fell behind the rest of the class. And she's watching this big hammerhead shark darting really close to the glass. And suddenly she feels all this weight up against her, and it's her teacher pushing her forward with his body to the point where she can't move.
This is mild compared to the ultimate shocking revelation to emanate from the young woman played by Flora Montgomery in Medea Redux, the first of three short plays - and one of two whose titles cite the influence of Euripides - in Neil LaBute's bash. There are more horrific confessions to follow in Iphigenia in Orem, in which a middle-management corporate employee (played by Jason Patric) pours out his dark soul to an unseen stranger, and in the ambiguously titled bash itself, the final play in which a young college-educated couple (Jason O'Mara and Justine Mitchell) recall in overlapping monologues a brutal crime committed on the night they attended a party at the Plaza hotel in Manhattan.
What makes all these revelations so deeply unsettling is the way LaBute grounds his characters in the sheer mundanity of life, lulling us with comforting incidental references to the routines as shopping and watching television. As we are drawn into these characters and their apparent sheer ordinariness, we become even more susceptible to the admissions that spill out of them and chill us to the core.
"That's often how things happen in life," LaBute said during a break in rehearsals earlier this week. "They're usually not planned. The moment before, the most boring things can be happening - when the window is blown out of a building, for example, or before someone has that clarity to know what they're going to do and then does it."
Anyone familiar with LaBute's first two films as writer and director will have an idea of what to expect. In his abrasive debut movie, In the Company of Men, two male company executives, resentful at the breakup of their personal relationships, decide to take revenge on women in general by subjecting a hearing-impaired secretary to manipulation and humiliation. It is no coincidence, then, when the company man in Iphigenia in Orem slips into a rant about it being time for "a bunch of these women with their MBAs and affirmative action nonsense (to) get the boot".
"There's no question that there's a thread between the kind of man that's on stage there and the men in In the Company of Men, who are rooted in this very anonymous business world," says LaBute, who is 38 and based in Chicago. "I keep going back to that so much because I know that world so well. "After leaving college, I worked for a computer software company in New York and during that time I got the whole design concept for In the Company of Men from riding the trains into Manhattan from Mount Kisco up in Westchester County - a town away from where the Clintons live now. I would see the same guys every day, all wearing the same dark conservative suits and white shirts. The only things that would change would be their ties - their last little bit of personal expression. Nothing too outlandish, of course, because they had to fit in the mould.
"As for that throwback dinosaur idea of how begrudging men were to give over power to women and to place blame on women when things went wrong - it was a very ingrained sense of privilege and distrust of any kind of change at all, be it woman, colour, religion. That changeover has been very difficult for some people to accept and it's taken place over a very short period of time - 30 or 40 years."
Nevertheless, In the Company of Men sharply divided audiences, with many condemning it as misogynistic. "I took to that okay because people were at least noticing it and saying something," says LaBute. "I felt bad at the time for the movie. Not for myself because I am not at all shattered by that sort of thing. But I felt some people were getting the idea of the movie wrong. It took this mantle of misogyny which, I think, kept people away - women, in particular - to a certain degree. But then I met a lot of women who saw the film and said they were surprised to find that they had liked it, that it didn't seem misogynistic at all.
"I know that the idea, the simple conceit of two men saying, `Let's hurt a woman for fun', gives a particular impression, but the film ends up being all about a great many other things. It's easy to label films, especially when they emerge at a big festival like Sundance, which that film did, and it becomes a kind of shorthand that it's this brutal tale of misogyny."
Just as some people who hated In the Company of Men will be taken aback by LaBute's own position on the issues he confronts, it comes as a greater surprise to his audience when they learn he is a Mormon. To most people here, I point out, the best-known Mormons are the Osmonds - Donny, Marie and their singing siblings - with their squeaky-clean, gleaming toothed image.
"People do have those ideas and see it through that image," says LaBute. "In the States, for example, there was a Time magazine cover story titled Mormon Inc, dealing with the money the church gets from its membership. People hear things and carry them in their heads, like the polygamy thing, and it seems curious to them, like a society they don't understand. So much has been carried through as folklore.
"It inevitably comes up in discussion of my work, how much it's reflected in my work. But to me, when I think about it all, it reflects in the same way as being a man, or my political beliefs, or what part of the country I'm from. I'm sure all of these things colour me to different degrees, but none of them exclusively. In fact, the characters in bash are the first specifically Mormon characters I've ever written about."
Just as LaBute chooses not to be defined by his religion, so he has deleted most of the Mormon references from the text of bash - which is ambiguously subtitled Latter-Day Plays - for its Dublin production, the first, incidentally, to be directed by LaBute himself, following its off-Broadway and London productions directed by Joe Mantello. "I meant that sub-title to have a double meaning," he says. "When I wrote it, it was the end of the millennium, and it also had the Mormon references. As we have been working on this production in Dublin, I've lifted out virtually all those references because I felt they left audiences feeling that they were at a bit of distance, that it was about a certain group of people, and that it wasn't so much about them, the audience, but much more to do with that religion making the characters react in a certain way.
"That was never my intention. It's about people who are religiously based and then came up against these hard choices. Nor did I want to change it and say `let's make them Catholic'. There's now a more generalised sense of them being religious minded, going to church and then faced with these problems and often making a bad choice."
In his second film, Your Friends & Neighbors, LaBute, with characteristic honesty and cool detachment, turns his probing lens on three men and three women as he rips down the cosy facades with which they try to delude themselves and each other that nothing is wrong. Entirely eschewing exterior shots to intensify the movie's tightly framed, claustrophobic compositions, LaBute casts a withering eye over his protagonists to reveal - and question - their sexual power games and propensity for deceit. To that end, he employs some startlingly frank dialogue, and never more so than in the utterly candid monologue spoken by the revenge-obsessed character, Cary (played by Jason Patric at his adventurous best) in a locker room confessional.
The common thread between Cary and most of the other men in LaBute's work is insecurity and the fear of losing power and control. "Yes, there's a distrust of anything they're not familiar with," says LaBute. "They're often guided by some set of principles, as misguided as those principles are. There's some foundation, this sense of having been moulded by your surroundings. Like the way one of the men in bash says, `I know the scriptures, I know them pretty well, and this is wrong'. That's all he feels he really needs to know.
"Jason's character in Iphigenia in Orem is very much rooted in the old days. He likes things to stay they way they always were before affirmative action had to be brought in. Jason's character in Your Friends & Neighbors is driven by this albeit odd principle of eye-for-an-eye justice. Every time he very matter-of-factly talks about some atrocity he has committed, it's always because someone did something to him and he feels he's putting the world back together again."
LaBute confounded expectations with his third film, Nurse Betty, which goes on video release here next Monday. This dark-toned and often uproariously funny commentary on our media age features Renee Zellweger as the sweet-natured personification of radiant innocence, a naive, small-town Kansas waitress who is so traumatised by witnessing the brutal murder of her crime-dabbling husband (LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart) that she confuses real life with the medical soap opera to which she is addicted. With the killers (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) on her trail, she sets out for Los Angeles to make contact with a character from the soap.
LaBute cites Flaubert: "As he said, `Be savage in your work, so that you can be ordinary in your life'. Whether it ends up being a piece of therapy or just wanting to do good story-telling, part of the disadvantage of writing today is that there are so many stories that have been told that people say there are no new stories. You come in to that stuff every time you sit down with a blank sheet of paper.
"When it came to Your Friends & Neighbors, for example, there had been so many stories about betrayal and adultery that if this one didn't have some new take on it, why go back to that well again? That's what I liked about Nurse Betty, having not written it originally. (Though directed by LaBute, the film was written by John Richards, James Flamberg and John C. Richards.) I recognised the elements, but there were some new takes on it, enough to keep me interested.
"That's always the bottom line of what you have to do: you make a contract with an audience and say, `I will try and entertain you in a new way and not just give you what you've liked before'. So for me it's actually work. It's not just that my mind goes off and I used to draw swirls when everyone else drew straight lines. I continue to know how to draw straight lines, but I like the swirls. I like doing something different to what I've seen."
And now for something completely different again, LaBute has finished filming A.S. Byatt's Booker-winning novel, Possession, for release towards the end of the year. The film's parallel storylines deals with two present-day academics (played by Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow) and two Victorian poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle). LaBute collaborated on the daunting task of adapting the book for the screen with Laura Jones whose screenwriting credits include the adaptations of The Portrait of a Lady and Angela's Ashes.
To his delight, Byatt is happy with its progress: "She came several times to the set and she's happy with the way it looks and the way we've dealt with it. She has been incredibly generous about it. She understood that we had to find a way into it. There were obvious things that had to go - you just can't translate the dense story and poems she wrote for these characters.
"Finding the dramatic spine of the two stories, the challenge was making the present-day story as interesting as the one set in the past, which has a lot going for it beyond costumes and the period feel. The great tragedies are embedded in that story, and the people in the present are constantly talking about that, so we had to really work to make the present as compelling. My way in was to change one of the present-day characters to an American academic, because I had experience of being an American at school in London and being an outsider. It immediately made sense and we gave him a different backstory to the one in the book."
Does he fear a backlash from purist admirers of the book? "There's a certain element you can never please," he says. "I knew going into it I was not going to make everybody happy. I've already had e-mails from people who were in Whitby when we were filming there and they're complaining that Jennifer Ehle's hair is not blonde. Yes, that is correct, it's red, and there's a number of reasons why we did that. If people are bothered by detail like that, you can never win. Hopefully those who are a little more open will find merit in it."
bash opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin for a limited three-week run next Tuesday.