It should come as no surprise to any fan of the Edmonton arts scene to discover that Northern Light Theatre’s artistic director, Trevor Schmidt, is drawn to the work of American playwright Neil LaBute—whose play Fat Pig he’s directing as Northern Light Theatre’s season closer this week.
            Known for an ever-edgy body of work boasting sharp social and political corners, Schmidt’s oeuvre in the past few years has tilted significantly towards intellectually-demanding plays, presented with flair and more than a few theatrical twists.
            His two most famous works are The Shape of Things—a play/film where an ice-cold art student hideously re-shapes and publicly humiliates her boyfriend to earn an MFA and media infamy—and  In the Company of Men—a rather horrific flick in which two bored corporate shark types callously conspire to woo and emotionally devastate a hearing-impaired woman.
            Other controversial LaBute plays include The Mercy Seat and Bash, the former about a morally ambiguous World Trade Center worker sitting out the aftermath of 9/11 in his mistress’ loft, the latter a nasty play about a horrific  gay-bashing undertaken by a handful of seemingly up-right Mormon tourists.
            LaBute’s works are always gritty, typically murky and profoundly psychologically complex plays often based on classical Greek (The Shape of Things is a reversal of Pygmalion) or profane urban legends, usually depicting characters in extreme, but always recognizable conflicts.
            The playwright has called his characters post-modern incarnations of Restoration-era cads and fops: people with too much time and money on their hands and have a tendency to do harm to others “just because” the opportunity was there, and they can.
            The upshot is a body of work about characters all too eager to push, pull and callously toy with each other and with the dictates of fate, always out to massage the circumstances around them for what they perceive as their own gain in what LaBute himself has called “the painful, simplistic warfare we often wage on the hearts of those we profess to love.”
            I sat down with Schmidt to talk about LaBute, love and the challenges of mounting such a contentious show.

SEE: What can you tell me about Fat Pig plot and theme-wise?  How do you see this particular show fitting into LaBute’s theatrical oeuvre?
Schmidt:  It’s one of his more straight-forward plays, almost startlingly so.  Plot-wise it’s pretty simple: guy meets and starts dating heavy-set woman, gets flack from office and needs to decide if he wants to continue seeing her.  That’s it.  There’s no twist ending.  This is a very Northern Light friendly play in that it’s a play where people behave—and say horrifying things—the way that people actually do in real life, and have trouble attaining the sort of betterment that we all want, for the most part.  All the plays that interest me are about missed and lost potential and relationships are all about the potential for connection and satisfaction.  For example, why doesn’t everyone find someone given that everyone is out there looking for someone?

SEE: How does this show fit into you oeuvre as a director?
Schmidt:  It’s perfect for me.  It falls somewhere between comedy and drama, a work that is bound to move people to thought and emotion.  In fact, people who have been talking about this play all season are now saying they can’t see it because they are making judgements about the content and the title.  Theatre-goers need to get beyond the title, just like in the play it’s about getting surface reactions.  The characters in this show are all flawed but they are also very human.  I think the most shocking thing about all of LaButes’s plays is that the people in them acknowledge their flaws so openly and resign themselves to be unsympathetic, and stubbornly refuse to learn from their mistakes.  It’s much easier for us as audiences to forgive character flaws if the characters don’t know or see their flaws.

SEE: How did you first hear about this play, and what initially attracted you to it?
Schmidt:  I directed a successful production of The Shape of Things in Saskatchewan that was remounted four times a few seasons back that got me interested in Neil LaBute and following his career.  As for this particular play, I liked the fact the success of the play LaBute wrote after Fat Pig eclipsed Fat Pig and made people skip over it.  That was perfect for me and Northern Light.  I also had a good relationship with the agent who was happy to see us do that show.

SEE: What are some of the challenges you’re finding mounting the show?
Schmidt:  For starters: how do you ask girls to audition for a play with the title of Fat Pig?  This is a show that is going to be very delicate subject matter, really touchy stuff, for at least one person in your cast.  Everyone has an issue or a relative or friend with this subject matter.  I’ve had my own eating disorder, I know all about it and still have my body issues.

SEE: You set your last play—Hard Sell—in a see through mesh box, giving the whole work the feeling of a cage fight.  Tell me a bit about the design of this production?
Schmidt: Kerem Cetinel, the set and lighting designer, created a really minimalist design that manages to work for all the play’s various locations while being elegant and sterile in general.  It’s all very multi-functional and all in white because (LaBute’s) world is pretty black and white.

SEE: Westerners seem to have never been more obsessed with physical transformations, radical makeovers, style, grooming and personal appearance—evidenced in Canada by the raging controversy over the Prim Minister’s stylist.  What’s your take on all this lookism?
Schmidt:  I spend a month in New York at the beginning of the year and was amazed by all the people I was seeing who look alike because they could afford to get the work done.  I saw women with the same face, the same hair.  That got me thinking about how the more we get all homogeneous, the more difference is disappearing.  We all work out, we all get the contacts and caps on teeth, what’s next?  Do we then tone down personality so we don’t stand out?  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for grooming, but I don’t want it to be an obsession.  The danger being that the more obsessed we get with the outside the more tarnished we get on the inside.  You can all too easily starve your soul as well as body to look like that.

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