Who would distrust Judith Light? With her trim frame and patrician looks, she seems a living synonym for confidence and poise. Her elegant authority is used to fine and sly effect in Neil LaBute’s All the Ways to Say I Love You, elevating a mildly sensational monodrama into a reasonably compelling character study.
Light’s Mrs Johnson, an English teacher and occasional guidance counselor, is discovered in her drab office. The piles of books and folders that overwhelm most surfaces are the first indication that Mrs Johnson might not be as self-possessed as she seems. There are pauses in her careful speech and a certain recursiveness in her rhetoric, as though she’s circling around thoughts she’d rather not articulate. Though she recommends herself as a truthful woman – the word “truth” occurs a dozen times in her speech, “fact” and “honestly” also turn up often – it becomes clear that she lies to her husband, to her lover, to herself.
All the Ways to Say I Love You would be a stronger and more provocative piece if Mrs Johnson were lying to us, too, or if LaBute had ever decided who we were and why she was speaking to us. Unlike the more powerful monologues in Bash, his earlier collection of solos and one duet, the play never specifies to whom she is making this confession and when and how, which renders the drama more tenuous.
The confession concerns a sexual relationship she had with a student some years previously. Though a liaison between a teacher and a student is clearly an abuse of power, the student was over the age of consent and an enthusiastic participant. (No reverse-gender Blackbird here.) Curiously, this seems a rare pulled punch for LaBute, a writer of maximal squirm-induction. Audiences watching his early plays could be forgiven for thinking their seats had been sprinkled with itching powder.
Still, LaBute hasn’t mellowed too much. While Mrs Johnson’s overarching preoccupation is with the ways in which this encounter has continued to reverberate throughout her life, she spends a lot of time dilating on the sex itself, finally declaring, in a crescendo suggesting orgasm, “I loved it. Every second of every day when that boy was fucking me!”, which is probably meant to shock the few people in the audience who haven’t seen Transparent.
Despite LaBute’s gifts for ordinary speech, the iterations and tangents and dead-ends, much of this would seem factitious or possibly even silly, were it not for Light’s finely calibrated performance and Leigh Silverman’s assured direction. Silverman charts emotional terrain like an expert geographer. Here she has rather more to work with than in LaBute’s last play, the staggeringly uneventful The Way We Get By, and she helps Light to particularize the pace and heat of each new disclosure. Light lets her personal constancy contrast with the messiness of Mrs Johnson’s personal life, showing how a woman who believes herself in control can be revealed as powerless. If any doubt remains, she’s the boss.
