This Is How It Goes: A Play

by Neil LaBute

Belinda and Cody Phipps appear a typical Midwestern teenage sweethearts, children, luxurious home. Typical except that Cody is black--"rich, black, and different," in the words of Belinda, who finds herself attracted to a former (white) classmate. As the battle for her affections is waged, Belinda and Cody frankly doubt the foundation of their initial attraction, opening the door wide to a swath of bigotry and betrayal. Staged on continually shifting moral ground that challenges our received notions about gender, ethnicity, and even love itself, This Is How It Goes unblinkingly explores the myriad ways in which the wild card of race is played by both black and white in America.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2005

About the author

Neil LaBute is an American film director, screenwriter and playwright.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, LaBute was raised in Spokane, Washington. He studied theater at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At BYU he also met actor Aaron Eckhart, who would later play leading roles in several of his films. He produced a number of plays that pushed the envelope of what was acceptable at the conservative religious university, some of which were shut down after their premieres. LaBute also did graduate work at the University of Kansas, New York University, and the Royal Academy of London.

In 1993 he returned to Brigham Young University to premier his play In the Company of Men, for which he received an award from the Association for Mormon Letters. He taught drama and film at IPFW in Fort Wayne, Indiana in the early 1990s where he adapted and filmed the play, shot over two weeks and costing $25,000, beginning his career as a film director. The film won the Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, and major awards and nominations at the Deauville Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Thessaloniki Film Festival, the Society of Texas Film Critics Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle.

LaBute has received high praise from critics for his edgy and unsettling portrayals of human relationships. In the Company of Men portrays two misogynist businessmen (one played by Eckhart) cruelly plotting to romance and emotionally destroy a deaf woman. His next film Your Friends & Neighbors (1998), with an ensemble cast including Eckhart and Ben Stiller, was a shockingly honest portrayal of the sex lives of three suburban couples. In 2000 he wrote an off-Broadway play entitled Bash: Latter-Day Plays, a set of three short plays (Iphigenia in orem, A gaggle of saints, and Medea redux) depicting essentially good Latter-day Saints doing disturbing and violent things. One of the plays was a much-talked-about one-person performance by Calista Flockhart. This play resulted in his being disfellowshipped from the LDS Church. He has since formally left the LDS Church.

LaBute's 2002 play The Mercy Seat was one of the first major theatrical responses to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Set on September 12, it concerns a man who worked at the World Trade Center but was away from the office during the attack — with his mistress. Expecting that his family believes that he was killed in the towers' collapse, he contemplates using the tragedy to run away and start a new life with his lover. Starring Liev Schreiber and Sigourney Weaver, the play was a commercial and critical success.

LaBute's latest film is The Wicker Man, an American version of a British cult classic. His first horror film, it starred Nicolas Cage and Ellen Burstyn and was released on September 1, 2006 by Warner Bros. Pictures to scathing critical reviews and mediocre box office.

He is working with producer Gail Mutrux on the screen adaptation of The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff.

Reviews

[Elliot Chalom · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many layers to this. And to be fair, a lot of problems too, especially reading this here and now in 2019. But probably even then in 2005 too. Can I recognize all of its … issues … and yet still love it? I think so. Hard not to have very complicated feelings about this play. Not sure I could see it on stage without cringing. But so much to unpack too. Wow

[Martin Denton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Man meets up with the girl--a young married woman, actually, whose name is Belinda--outside of Sears, in the same American small town where they both grew up. She doesn't remember him, at first; but he totally remembers her. He was a fat, geeky kid when they were high schoolers; she was (still is) pretty, popular. But she finds, as they chat, that she's glad to see him, and even pretends to remember the sort-of date he says they had a dozen years ago (he took her to a drive-in movie with a bunch of other kids). The upshot of the reunion is that Belinda makes another sort-of date to see him again, tomorrow in fact, at the strip mall.

He's been away for a long time--went to college, became a lawyer, married; now, for reasons he seems reluctant to divulge, he's back, no longer married, no longer a lawyer. She married the guy who could be referred to as her high school sweetheart, Cody Phipps, who was a superstar back then and son of one of the richest guys in town. Cody is enormously successful now, too, with a seriously Type A disposition, as we'll see for ourselves when we meet him in the next scene.

Oh, yeah: Cody's Black. We observe that our hero/narrator registers the teeniest bit of surprise when Belinda says she and Cody are married.

So, what happens next is, Belinda and Cody meet our narrator for lunch, where they talk about--among other things--the fact that he is going to move into the apartment over their garage that they've just finished remodeling. He's restarting his life, as a writer now, needs a place to stay; this is convenient. There's evident tension between him and Cody, but, despite that, Belinda seems happy about the arrangement.

Waiting for the waitress to take their order, our narrator lets slip the vaguest of racial epithets.

And so it goes. Man moves in, and moves in--slowly--on Belinda, as we expect; Belinda and Cody's relationship, meanwhile, strains and deteriorates. Too much of the trouble is revealed to be about race. Belinda married Cody, she says, because being a Black man's wife would make her "stand out" in this stifling small town. Cody married Belinda, we are led to believe, because a beautiful white wife was, for him, the ultimate trophy.

Matters come to a head at an informal barbecue, where our narrator tells Cody and Belinda why he has come back to his hometown. Race--racism--figures significantly here. LaBute reaches the most important place in his storytelling in this climactic scene: he's defined a universe of characters who can't see anything about each other beyond the (different) colors of their skins. By withholding his protagonist's name, and by making him so breezily charming to us, he implicates us, cannily. LaBute is saying: Americans who don't, on some level, still struggle with the "race card" are lying.

But he doesn't end This Is How It Goes here; it goes on for several more scenes, with the ugliness intensifying as the Man and Cody are revealed to be more typically LaButian than we'd initially been led to believe, by which I mean that they are exposed as soulless, shallow, abusive men without regard for the humanity of Belinda or, presumably, any other woman. I found this part of the play hard to swallow--the nasty plot revelation, foreshadowed from the very beginning of the piece, hinges on character details that just didn't ring true for me. I also found this section gratuitously mean: LaBute's world view seems so bitter, and I wonder where the bitterness comes from.

But This Is How It Goes works, nonetheless, both as a mirror brought cruelly and calculatedly up to racist America's pretty face and as a nasty shock drama.

[Knight Of · Rating 4 out of 5]

As of now, I've read two of Neil La Brute's plays. He has a habit of making unlikeable but interesting characters in order to make his point.

[Kathy Xie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. exceedingly unlikeable characters but they're decently developed; everyone's motivations made sense

[Robby]

Wow… wish I could see a production of this holy shit. So fucked up.

[Abby Wentworth · Rating 3 out of 5]

i hate all the characters! good read 😊

[Sara Elice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this play. I like the storytelling style, down to how LaBute structures the stage directions. Neil LaBute often writes about uncomfortable topics in incredibly smart ways and that's the case here. I really liked the twist and the fact that he lays the possible way's things went down out for the audience, but doesn't tell you exactly what happened. Normally I'd be frustrated by that, but in this case it works really well with the structure of the story.

[Christopher Hendrix · Rating 3 out of 5]

This may be the most out-of-the-air LaBute twist I've ever read. Crazy.

And the way he draws that parallel, it all… make sense. It's amazing how he does this.

I'm continually baffled by his abilities as a playwright.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the style of this Labute play. The way he handled this taboo topic was really interesting. Several fairly good scenes.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very Neil LaBute. An interesting look at race dynamics and marriage. I think I would cringe a bit seeing this produced. But that's just the way LaBute is - that's the point.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, I didn't finish. A white writer writing about the black experience? yeah - not for me.

[Joelle.P.S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paragon Theatre 2008

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty awesome...Amazing Labute twist....

[Lorma Doone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this one. Provocative. Hits on assumptions people make about interracial dating and race in general. Marriage is scary.