If you can’t smell a rat or two or ten during the first few minutes of Neil LaBute’s In a Forest, Dark and Deep, then your olfactory integrity must be seriously compromised.
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Bobby comes in out of an ominous thunderstorm and starts laying into Betty about all the guys she fucked around with when she was a teenager. Check. Betty casually remarks that, even if they can’t pack up all the books, the filing cabinet absolutely must go. Check. And when the ominous thunderstorm isn’t knocking out the power, the sibs spend a good two minutes remembering how dad always used to say the truth hurts. Check-checkity-check-check.
The perverse need to unearth dark domestic secrets—particularly the ones everyone already knows—has been a robust theme in American drama at least since Long Day’s Journey Into Night. And it’s hard to miss the debt In a Forest, Dark and Deep owes to Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, especially when it comes to those odd, tin-eared moments that hint at Bobby’s more-than-brotherly desire for his sister. But turning the quest for familial truth into compelling drama requires sophisticated plotting. LaBute mostly just lays things out where you can’t help but trip over them.
Through 6/3: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 5 and 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Profiles Theatre, 4139 N. Broadway, 773-549-1815, profilestheatre.org, $35-$40
