Bash: Latter-Day Plays
Bash: Latterday Plays is a collection of three dark one-act plays written by
Bash: Latterday Plays later made its
The characters featured in each of these works come from different backgrounds of the
The entire work typically takes about 100 minutes total in performance. A special note on grammar and style in Bash: the title of the full work, as well as the titles of the three pieces that comprise the work, regularly appear in all lowercase letters. Occasionally, the word "latterday" will have a hyphen inserted between the second and third syllables. Early publicity for productions of the work followed suit. In the first printed editions of the play, the names of characters and the beginnings of sentences were also not capitalized. Often, the characters' lines are written in an attempt to capture the contractions and patterns of contemporary American speech, such as "'s true" instead of "it is true" or "it's true."
"iphigenia in orem"
The eponymous
The play is a
"a gaggle of saints"
Two attractive college-age adults, John and Sue, alternately address the audience, never speaking to each other. They relate the superficial details of a fancy party which they attended together in New York City. During the course of the monologue, John describes leaving Sue and the rest of the girls sleeping in the hotel room and coming across two middle-aged gay lovers (whom they had previously encountered earlier in the evening) in Central Park with his friends. The boys proceed to follow one of the men into a public bathroom and where they savagely beat the man seemingly to death before one of John's friends, Tim, offers up a short eulogy to the man. John and his two friends then go back to the hotel to call the girls down for breakfast where John tells the audience that Tim notices he has a noticeable amount of blood on his shirt. In an effort to make up a story for Sue, John has Tim break his nose in order to play off the injury and blood to Sue as his own mistake walking along the edge of a fountain. At breakfast, John presents Sue with a ring that he had stolen from the man they attacked in the Central Park restroom. At the end of the play, John and Sue interact for the first and only time on stage embracing one another and posing for a picture together as the flash of a camera bulb is heard and seen before going fading to black.
"medea redux"
A woman sits alone at an institutional table, chain smoking. She describes a sexual relationship she had, at thirteen, with her junior high school arts and sciences 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 son, without giving the audience any clear motive for the act, but presumably 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.
See also
- Blood atonement
- Homosexuality and the LDS Church
- Latter Day Saints in popular culture
- Mormonism and violence
References
- ^ "Bash: Latterday plays, a CurtainUp London review".
- ^ "LaBute's bash: latter day plays Ends Boston Premiere Oct. 28". Playbill. October 28, 2000.
- ^ "Barebones productions". Archived from the original on 2011-07-07. Retrieved 2011-07-25.
- ^ "The Home of London Theatre".
Further reading
- Ben Brantley, "Theater Review; The Face of Evil, All Peaches and Cream", The New York Times, 1999-06-25 (includes a review of Bash)