Bash

Neil LaBute's trio of riveting monologues in Bash share a common setup: a seemingly ordinary, innocent person reveals dark, evil secret in banal, deadpan fashion.  In the first monologue, "Medea Redux," Calista ("Ally McBeal") Flockhart turns in a skilled performance as a young woman sitting in a pool of harsh light and recounting for the police how and why she came to kill her small child.  The monologue describes her seduction at 13 by her high school science teacher, an act that contrasts her sweet, trusting humanity against his unctuous, cynical nature.  Pushed to the breaking point by his continuing manipulation, she commits infanticide as a last-resort revenge.  In "Iphigenia in Orem," Ron Eldard is equally effective as an all-too-eager-to-please salesman who also commits infanticide, this time for reasons of self-aggrandizement which ultimately prove pointless and unnecessary, a kind of grisly bad joke.

In "A Gaggle of Saints," Flockhart returns to play Sue, an effervescent college girl who prattles on about a groovy party weekend in New York while her tuxedo-clad boyfriend (the estimable Paul Rudd) reveals the dark side of the weekend in a boastful rap about the way he and his buddies beat up (and maybe even murdered) a gay they encountered in Central Park.  LaBute may be fixated on the madness and violence simmering beneath the surface of polite, conventional American society, but he does make good drama out of it (with director Mantello's superior help).