Keep your distance from Black Box stage while this stinker is running

By Joe Brown (contact)

Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008 | 2 a.m.

We’ve all heard someone say, “That was so disgusting I have to take a shower.” That’s how I felt while sitting through “The Distance From Here” at the Black Box at Little Theatre of Las Vegas.

I actually did shower when I got home, mostly because the actors smoked almost incessantly through the two-hour show. The script calls for almost every character to puff away in nearly every scene, and sure, they use clove-y stage cigarettes, but they still stink up the place.

Welcoming the audience, the director announced that “there is lots and lots of smoking and profanity, so if that offends you, go to the box office right now. There will be no refunds once the play has started.”

I didn’t have that option.

The play stinks, too. “Distance,” by bad boy Neil LaBute, is a purposely repellent play about degraded people using debased language. And when it’s inadequately performed, it’s just abusive to the audience.

Yet another trope about “the dark side of American suburbia,” “Distance” opens with a scene of two shaggy teenage boys — one an alpha male, the other his submissive sidekick — tormenting monkeys at the zoo. The lanky actors lean against a railing set way upstage, shouting right in the faces of the first row. In the next scenes, we’re watching them and their family and friends smoke, sneer, slurp, slobber, scratch and swear.

Mostly swear. The script racks up most of the major curse words way before the intermission. Sample dialogue: “I f— you not.” “S— of that nature.” And (really) “I hate this f— show.”

Anyway, we get it. We’re animals. Can we go home and shower now?

LaBute’s bestial scenario tosses nine characters with no expectations into a cage. Most are unwanted children with their own unwanted children, and they alternate between sullenness and inarticulate rage.

Moments of affection are followed almost immediately by hostility or violence. While a baby wails unattended in another room, its young mother ignores it, telling her friend (her stepmother, it turns out) that she’s not going to give it “false expectations.”

It’s not enlightening and it’s not entertaining. You could spend two hours hanging out in front of a random 7-Eleven and come away with the same effect.

There’s supposed to be grim humor here, but it doesn’t come off. There are symbols, though: a TV lies facedown on a couch; a garbage can features prominently in the climactic (and most repulsive) scene.

The Little Theatre’s actors (I won’t name anyone) certainly work hard for their moment of appalled applause.