This is How It Goes (46 cents)

Neil Labute seems to take promising situations and turn them into a disaster. The first of his plays that I saw was "The Shape of Things", where a promising young romance turned into a menage a trois ala "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" Then, I saw "Fat Pig", about a young man who falls in love with an obese young woman, only to dump her when his friends disapprove. And dump very unceremoniously.

So, when I went to see "This is How It Goes", billed as a play based on relationships and racism, I feared the worst. I thought it a profound play, much to my surprise.

Three characters, twelve years after their high school graduation. Two (black man, white woman) are married; the third (white man), recently divorced, returns to his home town and becomes the tenant of his married friends, living in an apartment above their garage.

It gets very complicated very fast. The black male is an alpha-male, handsome, wealthy, charming, driven, goes to sleep at 2 a.m. and runs ten miles in the morning before work. The woman wants to be noticed. She is attractive, nice, but maybe not much else. The white male, who is also the narrator, speaking to the audience and setting the scenes that he is usually in, is even harder to read. He is charming, seems to have had some troubled years behind him, but makes a lot of mischief. He has always been in love with his former classmate, present landlady. And he has always resented her husband, who was a bit too-alpha for him, and who bullied him around when he, the white man, was a pudgy high schooler.

You can see the tension building. I am not going to tell you how it goes. And even, when you see the play, you may not know. The while male tells the audience at the beginning that he may not be a credible narrator. He says that truth is illusive, as it in fact always is.

Yes, racism is there, both as an assumption and an undercurrent, until it erupts, and then again recedes.

There is a lot of truth in "This is How It Goes", illusive as it may be.