October 14-17, 2025 at 7:30 p.m.
October 18, 2025 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
The Emerson Black Box Theater
Content Advisory
The Shape of Things contains adult language, frank discussions around sexual themes, and situations that are intended for mature audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.
Show Description
How far would you go for love? For art? What would you be willing to change? What price might you pay? Such are the painful questions explored by Neil LaBute in THE SHAPE OF THINGS. A young student drifts into an ever-changing relationship with an art major while his best friends' engagement crumbles, so unleashing a drama that peels back the skin of two modern-day relationships.
Praise for The Shape of Things
"[LaBute] continues to probe the fascinating dark side of individualism, whose ultimate evil is an inability to imagine the suffering of others … LaBute’s great gift is to live in and to chronicle that murky area of not knowing, which mankind spends much of its waking life denying. Where does truth end and fiction begin? Is the fiction more valuable than the truth? Do the results justify the means?"
—John Lahr, The New Yorker
"What is art? What are you permitted to do in its name? … These questions are thrown up by a piece whose intricate layers of treachery are worthy of David Mamet …"
—Paul Taylor, The Independent
"LaBute is a smart, ambitious writer who, at his best, dares to explore the ambivalence hiding under the weave of our social fabric. He always has a serious intellectual project in mind, and here he aims at no less than the subjectivity of love and the definition of art itself. THE SHAPE OF THINGS is compulsively watchable.”
—Gordon Cox, Newsday
“LaBute is the most gifted, intelligent and wittily moral American playwright since Wallace Shawn; that is high praise, believe me. And this play marks his theatrical maturity. It’s a must see.”
—Michael Coveney, Daily Mail
About the Playwright
Neil LaBute received his Master of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University and was the recipient of a literary fellowship to study at the Royal Court Theatre, London. He also attended the Sundance Institute's Playwrights Lab and is the Playwright-in-Residence with MCC Theatre in New York City. LaBute's plays include: BASH: LATTER-DAY PLAYS, THE SHAPE OF THINGS, THE MERCY SEAT, THE DISTANCE FROM HERE, AUTOBAHN, FAT PIG (Olivier Award nominated for Best Comedy), SOME GIRL(S), THIS IS HOW IT GOES, WRECKS, FILTHY TALK FOR TROUBLED TIMES, IN A DARK DARK HOUSE, REASONS TO BE PRETTY (Tony Award nominated for Best Play) and THE BREAK OF NOON. In 2011 his play IN A FOREST, DARK AND DEEP premiered in London's West End. LaBute is also the author of Seconds of Pleasure, a collection of short fiction which was published by Grove Atlantic. His films include In the Company of Men (New York Critics' Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmaker Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival), Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things, a film adaptation of his play of the same title, The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace and Death at a Funeral.
