Autobahn: A Short-Play Cycle

by Neil LaBute

Book Overview

"Sitting in an automobile was where I first remember understanding how drama works...Hidden in the back seat of a sedan, I quickly realized how deep the chasm or intense the claustrophobia could be inside your average family car." --Neil LaBute

Be it the medium for clandestine couplings, arguments, shelter, or ultimately transportation, the automobile is perhaps the most authentically American of spaces. In Autobahn, Neil LaBute's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571211100
• ISBN13: 9780571211104
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Enjoyable on the page or on the stage.

I have both read these plays and seen them produced at a small theater in Los Angeles. Whether on the page or stage, these plays are always interesting, incisive, and leave you pondering them for days afterward. Much like a good short story, LaBute is able - in just a few pages - to conjure up his worlds and characters in full, letting you know enough about them that you have a good idea (often an unsettling one, to tell the truth) of what happens to characters once the play ends. It's not all doom and gloom, though. There are laughs throughout, even the occasional sweet moment, albeit against backdrops that aren't 100% wholesome. Although if you are looking for 100% wholesome, LaBute wouldn't be your first choice. From an acting point of view, it's difficult to find material that does a better job of celebrating theater in its most basic form. Difficult to be sure (in many of the plays, one of the characters doesn't say anything at all!), but thrilling when well executed. The short play, like the short film, doesn't have a lot of marketability in the commercial sphere, and it is a treat that one of our leading playwrights has tried his (expert) hand at them. If you like short stories, or are a fan of good writing for the stage, you'll enjoy Autobahn.

Wow again

I've read all of Labute's plays, and this one is greater than the others in some new and interesting ways. I always read his introduction last, because it usually gives away some of the story. This intro said two really cool things. He introduces the first cool thing by a fellow playwright wanting to "see his play performed in living rooms, in front of audiences of ten or twelve people. I feel the same way. Theater is anywhere you make it. I hope that with this print edition of autobahn actors take the text and memorize it, gather their friends in their own cars, and take off down the road, filling those intimate interiors with my words and their emotions. That would be a pleasure to behold." This is really cool, because as I was reading one of the six acts in the play called "long division," I realized that was a play that I would enjoy memorizing and performing in front of friends. I'm not an actor at all, but this book contains a bunch of one person and two person stories that are short enough for the lay person to memorize. That's what I think is cool about this book, is I could picture high school drama classes using this, and it really is some of the best literature out there. It's also ironic, because all of his books have a warning about needing to arrange a royalty schedule for any public performance of his play. The second cool thing is about how plays encourage the imagination by having very scaled down and limited sets. I saw a local play that had a limited set about a week after reading this intro, and Labute's discussion on this aspect of theater accentuated my experience. About the actual stories...I keep using the word "haunting" to describe his work. It's extremely well written, and the stories just stick with me. I keep thinking of the story where the girl tells her mother "I know I'm gonna do everything within my power to use again." For some reason I can't get that out of my mind, and I think that it's kind of an allegory to a bunch of other things in life. The other one that sticks with me is where the husband tries to convince himself that the wife didn't do it again. "You didn't, did you? No, you didn't. I know you wouldn't do that again. Right? You would not...Honey? Angel?" The rest of the stories are like that...they haunt me because they stick with me.