Seat Filler

Controversial playwright-screenwriter Neil LaBute has explored homophobia and homoeroticism in works like Bash, In a Dark Dark House, Your Friends & Neighbors, and In the Company of Men. Now he takes a straight if subdued shot at religious faith in MCC Theater’s world premiere of The Break of Noon, which runs through December 22 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Californication’s David Duchovny makes a strong major stage debut as John Smith, an everyman who claims to have heard the voice of God during what’s described — in an opening monologue of graphic details — as the worst office shooting in American history. Is John God’s vessel or just an opportunistic prick? The answer might surprise you. Without Duchovny or Amanda Peet as his ex-wife and ex-mistress, this production will reopen February 2 at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

After the Revolution, Amy Herzog’s intelligent and powerful drama about a fractured family of leftist radicals in 1999, ended December 12 at Playwrights Horizons. Katharine Powell carried the show as Emma, a law school grad who finds out that her blacklisted grandfather — in whose memory she created a legal fund to fight social injustice — was, in fact, a Russian spy. Peter Friedman played Emma’s Marxist dad, whose dreams for a gay child came true when Emma’s sister — Meredith Holzman, in an impressive off-Broadway debut — dated a girl. Lois Smith, Sookie’s murdered Gran on True Blood, also starred as Emma’s dotty grandma, who admitted that she almost slept with a woman who enticed her with a large clitoris. She also argues that homosexuality is caused by sexual abuse: “I’m not saying all of them, but almost all of them.”