Dark Comedy Penetrates Depths of Interracial Marriage

A combo of bigotry and betrayal slathered over a love triangle could easily become fodder for a bleak tragedy.

But playwright Neil LaBute prefers to craft dark, dark comedy.

So the real heartbreak cuts even more deeply.

His magic is ensconced in Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre through July 21 via This Is How It Goes.

In it, LaBute focuses on ex-footballer/speedster Cody, an angry black outsider but thriving businessman (“we’re not rich, we’re stinkin’ rich”) in a lily-white Midwestern community not unlike so many towns and cities in Marin County.

He’s married to a beautiful, blonde ex-cheerleader, Belinda.

But their illusory, comfy interracial posturing is inside-outed after they rent the room over their garage to an unnamed ex-high school acquaintance Cody dismisses as “a smartass, a jokester.”

One of LaBute’s devices is to redo a scene the Man — an ex-lawyer and ex-fatty (played by Ben Stiller in the original 2005 off-Broadway production) — may have severely distorted as a self-confessed “unreliable narrator.”

“Maybe it didn’t happen exactly that way,” he admits (more than once).

The conceit never quite reaches the dramatic mountaintops of Rashomon, but scores high on the tension scale.

I personally found the gimmick thought provoking — as well as intermittently befuddling.

Man often splinters the so-called Fourth Wall by directly confiding in the audience. Intentionally, he clarifies little, muddies a lot.

In the meantime, he hopes to rescue Belinda, whom he still desires a decade and a half after his adolescent crush — and therein, to borrow a cliché from Hamlet (rather than Othello, which LaBute teasingly references) lies the rub.

Nothing is what it initially seems in this one-act, hour-and-a-half, three-character play.

But that’s pretty standard fare for LaBute, who’s also well known (if not universally well regarded) for his unbending belief that all men are created equal — as brutal animals.

Tension keeps building as he sculpts lies and deception and manipulation, some shrouded in familiar racist epithets, others buried under emotional rockslides.

Scratch the surface of a man, LaBute believes, and you’ll find repulsiveness.

“Truth is so damn elusive,” he decrees through Cody, and then proves it by writing in additional twists, turns and character vicissitudes.

Tom Ross, Aurora’s artistic director who dexterously steers this show to its devastating windup, agrees — and fast-paces the limited action so you don’t notice the torrent of words.

All three actors along the way became blistering putty in the hands of Ross, who also directed the first LaBute play produced in the Bay Area, The Shape of Things in 2003.

The upshot?

Gabriel Marin is truly inspired as the vacillating Man, superbly handling the burden of shouldering most of LaBute’s biting humor. Aldo Billingslea inhabits Cody’s persona with more venom than I’d normally want to encounter. And Carrie Paff alternately plays sweet and irritating with distinction.

As a trio, they push numerous audience buttons.

LaBute, who became a Mormon while studying theater at Brigham Young University, has a lengthy history of creating misogynistic and cruel characters.

They’re guaranteed to agitate audiences.

I first saw that handiwork in In the Company of Men. in which two amoral guys strive to court and destroy a deaf woman. And I later was mesmerized by Bash: Latter-Day Plays, a one-stop short trilogy that caused his banishment from the Latter-Day Saints church.

Since then, he’s been labeled — many, many times — a misanthrope.

Seems accurate.

In rhythm and style and penchant for coarse language, I perceive him to be a reasonable facsimile of David Mamet. This comic drama, in fact, shadows Mamet’s Race, which effectively probed similar issues (plus rape) in an American Conservatory Theatre production in 2011.

This Is How It Goes is apt to leave theatergoers with the sense of having experienced something penetrating, something special — coupled with a slightly bad aftertaste.

Had I mistakenly gone in search of redemption, however, I’d still be looking.

This Is How It Goes runs at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley, through July 28. Night performances, Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Tuesdays and Sundays, 7 p.m.; matinees, Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $16-$50. Information: (510) 843-4822 or www.auroratheatre.org.