“A man’s a man for a’ that.” Few careers have begun as aptly as Neil Labute’s. First noticed for a cruelly ironic indie film, “In the Company of Men,” he has remained true to its theme of men who cannot love taking it out on women who try to love them. The slug line for the movie still brings chills of revulsion: “Two business executives--one an avowed misogynist, the other emotionally wounded by his girlfriend--set out to exact revenge on the female gender by seeking out the most innocent, uncorrupted girl they can find and ruining her life.” The fact that the girl happens to be deaf went so over the top that someone should have sniffed out Labute’s Swiftian slyness. Few did. Feminist nerves were rubbed raw, and in all the commotion his name was made.

Last night I marched past Nelson erect on his column – a macho monument from an unself-conscious age – to the Trafalgar Studios on Whitehall to see Labute’s extremely self-conscious Fat Pig. The title crashes through the front door. This is about how Tom, a handsome but nervous businessman, drops his guard one day and finds himself attracted to his opposite, a lovable, very fat girl who has received nothing but pain for her looks. The plot turns into an insignificant fable: Tom tries to hide that he is dating a fat girl, his jerk office mate Carter finds out and ribs him mercilessly, Tom loses his nerve and to protect his self-image drmps the girl and moves on. Now who’s the fat pig, you bastard?

I was mesmerized throughout – I’ll reveal why in a second – but the packed audience laughed nervously, perhaps expecting a comedy, perhaps uncertain about the play’s Americanness. Labute’s ear for gray office speak and jokey guy-to-guy lingo is near perfect. What would a British ear think? Critics fell back on clichés, typing the obvious theme – tolerating ‘the outsider’ – which is like saying that Hamlet is about learning how to make good decisions. Language is everything in Labute’s imaginary world, and its plainness, as banal as soap-opera dialogue squeezed dry of tanginess, is the key to his play’s mysterious poetry.

To the British, everyday language evokes John Osborne and the kitchen-sink era, but Labute is entirely different. In Osborne’s The Entertainer, Archie Rice’s sad sack vaudevillian keeps performing long past his day, hiding his failure beneath tattered charm and sodden raffishness. Archie knows he’s a flop, and so does the audience. Labute’s chatacters don’t perform; they don’t know how. Their way of talking is a shell, hiding themselves and more furtively hiding Labute. His males do what guys do -- they defend their egos by bullying, arguing, joking, playing childish games -- any distraction to avoid what lies underneath. In Fat Pig, Tom is baffled by the very possibility of feeling, which becomes like an electrified fence: if you don’t touch it, you can’t make it over to the other side. 

Helen, the fat girl he falls for, demands honesty from him, but even as Tom swears in bed that he loves her, she sniffs out the doubts lurking beneath. (“Beneath” is the motto on Labute’s escutcheon.) Why are we always by ourselves? Helen asks Tom. Are you hiding me from your friends? He is, of course, and in a climactic scene at the beach, when Tom the Handsome can’t bear to show off his more-than-fleshly girlfriend to his smirking co-workers, he mumbles miserably that he isn’t brave enough. He lacks the courage to cross the fence. The only serious flaw in the otherwise excellent production I saw was that the skilled actor Robert Webb, who caught Tom’s squirming evasiveness perfectly, was off physically. We needed Tom to be Warren Beatty with the jitters. 

Labute’s art is pure sleight of hand. Look up my sleeve – no symbols, no metaphors, no poetry. The only metaphor in the play comes from Helen’s name. Like Helen of Troy, she says, only they need a thousand ships to carry me away. The line arrives when Tom first meets her, and in the anguished scene where he dumps her, Helen looks out over the water and says, I wish those thousand ships would come. Fat Pig leaves you feeling sad for the failed love of Tom and Helen, but having invoked Paris and Helen, the play needs a poetic dimension to rise above its material. I sensed a kind of phantom poetry, if drawing emotional blood can be poetic. Labute’s dialogue is a slice of life, but if you listen, he slices with a fine scalpel.