810 The American Century: Literature since 1945first day at work, and so on. Of one of the victims, Nick declares that he was “just an
ordinary guy ... but you can’t say that in a eulogy.” On the whole, though, that is all
that is said about the victims of 9/11 in The Guys. For good or ill, the play belongs in
the honorable tradition of American populism that celebrates the “ordinary” rather
than the individual.
Superficially, The Mercy Seat (2002) by Neil LaBute (1963–) bears a resemblance
to The Guys. It also has just two characters and is set in New York City just after the
attack (in this case, the day after). It, too, studiously avoids addressing the larger
issues: LaBute has, in fact, insisted that The Mercy Seat is “not a play that concerns
itself with the politics of terrorism.” There, however, the resemblance ends. This
acerbic, sophisticated drama focuses on power and betrayal, in the process
deconstructing the belief lying at the heart of The Guys that, in a crisis, people can
and will rise above themselves and pull together. Ben Harcourt is in the apartment
of his boss and mistress, Abby Prescott, a woman twelve years older than him. It is
September 12, 2001. The day before, rather than going to his office in the World
Trade Center, Ben visited his mistress. He has not since gone home to his wife and
children, who probably believe that he is dead; a cellphone rings intermittently
throughout the play, and the implication is that it is Ben’s family trying to find out
if he has survived. Ben does not answer the phone. Instead, he considers the
opportunity 9/11 offers him to run away with Abby and start a new life with a new
identity. For him, much to the surprise and consternation of his mistress, the crisis
is “a meal ticket” – as she sardonically terms it. “I’m saying the American way is to
overcome, to conquer, to come out on top,” Ben explains. “And we do it by spending
and eating and screwing our women harder than anyone else.”
Ben is a survivalist. “No matter what’s happened or is going on,” he tells Abby, “we
still go to the movies and buy gifts and take a two-week vacation, because that’s-the-
way-it-is.” Abby, although caught up in the intricate power game of their relationship,
is much more ambivalent – and not just because she does not want to sacrifice a
successful career to go on the run. When it comes down to it, she wants Ben to tell
his family “the truth.” The twist in the tale is that eventually Ben reveals a different
truth from the one Abby imagines: almost at the end of the play he tells Abby that on
September 11 he was planning to break up with her. The revelation does not,
however, lead to a resolution of his self-imposed dilemma. As The Mercy Seat
finishes, Ben is still toying with the choices that the crisis has made available to him.
Like some dark parody of the traditional American hero, he is still caught between
the alternatives of, on the one hand, a return to home and family and, on the other,
escape into anonymity. The Mercy Seat may not be a political play in the conventional
sense. But it does explore the politics of personal and sexual relationships, what
LaBute calls “a particular kind of terrorism: the painful, simplistic warfare we
wage on those we profess to love.” And, in exposing the seamless egotism of Ben, it
not only subverts the consolatory myths of shared victimhood and communal
suffering on which a play like The Guys depends. It also identifies “the American
way” as opportunism. LaBute has explained that he tried in this play “to examine
how selfishness can still exist during a moment of national selflessness” and to lookGGray_c05.indd 810ray_c 05 .indd 810 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM