About the Play:

This Is How It Goes is a full-length drama by Neil LaBute. Belinda and Cody are a typical young American couple. Typical ... except Cody is black and Belinda is white. All appears to be going well until she becomes attracted to a former classmate who is also white. As the men battle for her affections, the door is opened to a world of bigotry and betrayal that was apparently just below the surface all the time.

This Is How It Goes is about about a seemingly perfect couple and the intricacies of marriage. Belinda and Cody Phipps "appear" to be the typical middle-class, interracial success story: teenage sweethearts now married with children and a luxurious home. Typical except that Cody is in almost every respect an outsider – "rich, black, and different," in the words of Belinda, who finds herself attracted to a white former classmate who has recently returned to town. As the battle for her affections is waged against a backdrop as seemingly serene as a Norman Rockwell painting, Belinda and Cody frankly question the foundation of their initial attraction, opening the door wide to a swath of bigotry, deception, and betrayal. Staged on continually shifting moral ground that challenges our received notions about gender, ethnicity, and even love itself, This Is How It Goes is also about truth and the many versions of it that we offer up to different people.

This Is How It Goes premiered in 2005 at The Public Theater off-Broadway in New York City.

Cast: 1 woman, 2 men

What people say:

"Neil LaBute is the first dramatist since David Mamet and Sam Shepard – since Edward Albee, actually – to mix sympathy and savagery, pathos and power." — New York Post

"Neil LaBute [is] our American Aesop, a mad moral fabulist serving stiff tonic for our country's sin-sick souls." — American Theatre

About the Playwright:

Neil LaBute is an award-winning American playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter. His plays include bash, Reasons to be Pretty (Tony Award nominated for best play), In a Forest, Dark and Deep, and Reasons to be Happy. His films include In the Company of Men (New York Critics' Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmaker Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival), Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things, Some Velvet Morning, and Dirty Weekend. He is a 2013 recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.