Theatre & dance / Film & TV / Literature
Neil LaBute
born 1963 · playwright, film director, screenwriter
Playwright and director of In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things, born in Detroit to a hospital receptionist and a long-haul trucker and raised in Spokane.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan
age 63- Birth name
- Neil N. LaBute
- Field
- Theatre & dance, Film & TV, Literature
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Neil LaBute was born in Detroit in 1963, the son of Marian, a hospital receptionist, and Richard LaBute, a long-haul truck driver, and grew up in Spokane, Washington, so Detroit is his birthplace rather than his hometown. He studied theater at Brigham Young University and later at New York University and the University of Kansas, writing a string of plays about cruelty in ordinary relationships. His play In the Company of Men, about two businessmen who toy with a deaf co-worker, became his first film in 1997 and won prizes at Sundance, the Independent Spirit Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle. He followed it with Your Friends & Neighbors, the A. S. Byatt adaptation Possession, The Shape of Things (from his own play) and a remake of The Wicker Man. His plays reasons to be pretty and Fat Pig brought him wide recognition on stage, the former earning a Tony nomination.
Highlights
- Wrote and directed In the Company of Men (1997), a Sundance prize winner
- Directed Possession (2002) and The Shape of Things (2003)
- Plays include The Shape of Things, Fat Pig and reasons to be pretty
- Tony nomination for reasons to be pretty (2009)