Neil LaBute’s new comedy thriller is not deep nor especially dark. It is, a fun, rug-snatching piece of light entertainment: lighter than you’d expect from the director/writer, whose major pieces cast a large and twisted shadow over any new little siblings.
When liberal arts dean Betty (Olivia Williams) calls in her younger brother, angry redneck Bobby (‘Lost’s Matthew Fox) to help pack up her log cabin, you don’t need the melodramatic thunder, lightning and power cuts to tell you something nasty is going to happen. What happens is sometimes surprising and always entertaining. But it’s never quite nasty, incestuous or revealing enough.
What is always gripping is Matthew Fox’s performance as Bobby – who starts out as a standard douchebag, necking Bud and passing judgment on Africa, U2 and his sister’s teenage promiscuity with varying degrees of racism, misogyny and accuracy. Under LaBute’s direction he becomes something more complex, candid and desolate – a puritan cowboy with no frontier except for his own rigid principles and the discomfort of others. It’s a subtle and seriously impressive performance.
Elegant, intelligent British actress Olivia Williams can’t navigate the character of his sister with such precision. It’s a tougher call: Betty has more manners but fewer morals, and her attempts to wriggle away from Bobby’s scrutiny drive the fairly predictable thriller plot. But it is hard to believe there’s a woman behind the words until the end, where she is finally free to emote in an unusally graceful, rounded speech (LaBute’s women are usually victims or vixens) about how middle age has made her feel ‘invisible.’
‘In a Forest, Dark and Deep’ is not a great play or, even in LaBute’s genre-unto-himself terms, an original one. It takes more than off-stage violence, un-PC rants and a little misplaced lust to shock an audience these days. And though this play does, eventually, plumb some of the emotional depths between brother and sister, its priorities are a little too obvious.