Beth's Reviews > In a Forest, Dark and Deep

Confession time: I have a weakness for plays like this - dramatic, small-cast, intense family plays, usually set in very limited locations. When I discovered Neil LaBute's new play was also about twins, I was desperate to read it, even though I knew I might not like what I found.

This play is nowhere near as surprising as it wants to be. It's also horrifyingly misogynistic. It's a two-character play, between a pair of middle-aged twins - Betty, a liberal arts college professor, and Bobby, a working-class carpenter. It's a cliche of writing that I experience very little in real life (I am a twin) that twins have to have alliterative and usually similar sounding names (Charles and Camilla in The Secret History and Bobby and Betty, among many others). Family secrets come out, and here we must return to the point of misogyny.

I am used to twincest always being a plot point in every piece of fiction about twins, ever. Neil LaBute takes the dynamic's probably most worn out trope, as it becomes increasingly obvious that Bobby loves Betty perhaps a little too much. Yet Bobby is the most sympathetic character. LaBute's "depth" completely deserts him here; he expects us to be shocked that the inarticulate, swaggering Bobby would in fact be a pretty decent guy with a deep love for his sister. Betty, on the other hand, is pretentious, needy, and has a serious history of sleeping with much older, married men, and also younger men now that she's married.

This is a cliche, but perhaps it's a cliche for a reason. The dynamic between the twins, however, is as relentlessly predictable as the dark and stormy night on which they meet again, only much darker and more woman-hating. Bobby's skin-crawling "love" for his sister is treated as something near-heroic and redemptive. Betty, on the other hand, is a preening and extremely manipulative narcissist, not above stringing along Bobby's incestuous feelings for her to implicate him in crimes.

It's not inherently misogynistic that Betty is a villain; what's misogynistic is that her character is so thin, so underdeveloped and predictable, that it seems to be her mere gender that makes her a compulsive married man stealer - and, even worse, she's an intellectual, intelligent, accomplished woman, while her brother, despite having been looked down on his whole life because he's not her intellectual equal, is in fact an essentially decent guy. Never mind that having the hots for your sister is disgusting. It's still more honourable than being a woman with sexual desire!

But - and I don't feel good about this - I was gripped by it. I think it would probably be a great play to see onstage, if you could find actors you were fans of, because Bobby and Betty may be poorly-written, sexually offensive stereotypes, but they are also great opportunities. I was captivated until the very last minute to see what would happen between Bobby and Betty and whether their "bond" would survive, even though I did feel like I needed a shower afterwards.