1- Manipulative twentysomething stirs up 'The Shape of Things/ By Christine Dolen/ Monday, November 11, 2002
2- The focal couple, Adam (Terrell Hardcastle) and Evelyn (Claire Tyler), meet not-so-cute: He's at one of his two jobs, working as a museum guard, when he discovers her ready to restore a nude statue's hidden manhood with spray paint. After some bantering, nervous exchanges, Adam asks for Evelyn's number. What he doesn't discover until way too late is that she already has his.
Adam has long seen himself as nothing special. But he works to improve himself -- eating better, working out, trading glasses for contacts -- in order to keep stoking the fires of a torrid affair. He sees Evelyn as utterly captivating: smart, provocative, fearless, irresistible. What we see is a manipulative young woman who is more than a little scary.
Adam's former roommate Phillip (Laif Gilbertson) and his fiancee, Jenny (Autumn Horne), also wander into Evelyn's web. They discover, at great personal cost, that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander in Evelyn's life.
The Shape of Things is improbably funny, even near its sobering surprise ending. It is also sexy, hot (there is nudity) and laced with vulgarities.
The performances, especially by Tyler and Hardcastle, are passionate and finely honed. Jeff Quinn's sliding Mondrian-style panels look busy but prove efficient at suggesting the play's many locations. Michael J. Hoffman's sound is artful too: Between-scenes music blasts so that you can't discuss what Evelyn might be up to, and a slight echo suggests the vastness of both the museum and a lecture hall. Daniela Schwimmer's costumes are age-appropriate and character-revealing, particularly Evelyn's eccentric ones.
Working with LaBute's provocative material, Adler sculpts The Shape of Things into must-see stage art
3- Review By Christine Dolen/
www.gablestage.org/season02-03/season-2b.php1- SRU theatre department opens first student-directed play in eight years featuring adult thematic elements/ Krystle Pellegrino/ 11/19/04
2- The Slippery Rock University Theatre Department opened its first student-directed play in eight years on Wednesday night at Miller Auditorium. "The Shape of Things" is a play that features only four cast members and was directed by senior Desiree Woidill...."This show is about people of our age dealing with the same things we deal with, which is why I think it is important for college students to see it," Woidill said. "It features mature thematic elements such as love and sex, and how they can change you and help you grow."The show was completely directed by Woidill with the guidance of Laura Smiley of the theatre department, who was Woidill's advisor and helped her along the way. The cast consists of four characters who are played by theatre department students Jeff Feola, Marquita Hefflin, Deanna Brooks and Nick Ciesielski."I have been in several plays here before, but I have never come across a cast with such chemistry and such a connection," Feola said. "You don't come across a cast like this one very often, if ever."
3- Review by Krystle Pellegrino/
www.theonlinerocket.com/media/storage/paper601/news/2004/11/19/Entertainment/The-Shape.Of.Things-811414.shtml1-The Shape of Things/ Arthur Lazere/ New York, Sep. 23, 2001
2- "In LaBute's new play, The Shape of Things, he turns the gender tables around--it is a woman exploiting a man this time. Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), an artist and graduate student, seduces Adam (Paul Rudd), and, with him in her thrall, proceeds to convince him to take various self-improvement steps: he changes his hairstyle, he starts going to the gym and losing weight, he changes his style of dressing, he gets contact lenses, he even has cosmetic surgery. The earlier steps seem positive--who could argue with healthy self-improvement? The nose job, though, takes it all a step further. Surgery purely for vanity's sake, as widespread as it is, raises fundamental value questions. Evelyn has engaged Adam's vanity to her own purposes, but the vanity is his: he has been corrupted. The choice of names--Adam and Evelyn--announces rather obviously: Biblical parable here! (There's even an apple offered.) Adam resists the surgery, further indicating that things have gone beyond self-improvement and into issues of manipulation and control. And when Adam dallies with his friend Jenny (Gretchen Moll), who is engaged to his former roommate (Frederick Weller), Evelyn makes him choose between them and her. As it turns out, she's even worse than that. [BIG SPOILER here.] Evelyn has been using Adam all along. He is the subject of her "art," a piece of conceptual art, if you will, for her master's thesis. Every artifact she has collected from Adam, every conversation they've had, every videotape of their sex together, all the documentation of the behaviors she has used her wiles to elicit from him were unfeelingly, clinically collected and are now put on display in a gallery. "
3- Review by Arthur Lazere/
www.culturevulture.net/Theater/ShapeofThings.htm1-Boy Hates Girl/ By David Edelstein/ May 8, 2003
2-In The Shape of Things (Focus Features), Neil LaBute rehashes the motifs that made his abrasive breakthrough, In the Company of Men (1997), and its even more toxic follow-up, Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), the all-time-champion worst dating movies. This one, based on his own four-character play, isn't as much of a battering ram: For a while, LaBute attempts to seduce you into thinking you're watching a modern—if somewhat stark—screwball comedy. But it isn't long before you start to steel yourself for the inevitable revelation of man's (or woman's) inhumanity to man (or woman). After all, what other reason does a Neil Labute movie have for being?
The Shape of Things has a tidy shape: It's a series of mostly two-character scenes with bits of ominous Elvis Costello songs in between them—their lyrics like curare-dipped projectiles. In the opening, the pudgy, bespectacled Adam (Paul Rudd), a security guard at a college art museum, watches Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), a gorgeous, flaky graduate student, prepare to deface a statue with a can of spray paint. The sculptor had been forced to cover the genitalia with a fig leaf, which upsets Evelyn's sense of aesthetic truth: Covering the statue with obscene graffiti is her idea of performance art. Adam tells her to cease and desist but doesn't work too hard to stop her. She might be a twittery weirdo with sociopathic tendencies, but she says he's cute—and this is the closest he has come to a romantic encounter in years.
3- A review by David Edelstein/
http://www.slate.com/id/2082750/
