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Kids Garment Rarely, since the Restoration, has any playwright peopled the stage with characters as hateful as has Neil LaBute. His preppie thugs and

desperate nerds murder babies, beat up strangers, humiliate the disabled. They're not too nice to women – although some of LaBute's females are nearly as

deadly as the males. "LaButeville", he has said, is a place that a driver passes by, not wanting to stop even long enough to fill up the tank.The latest

postcard from this edgy land is Fat Pig. Written in 2004, it is the second play in a trilogy about what LaBute calls "our fixation with physical beauty".

In the first, The Shape of Things (2001), a man remodels himself – weight loss, nose job – to please a manipulative woman. The third, Reasons to Be

Pretty, which will open on Broadway the week after Fat Pig debuts here, deals with the emotional upheavals caused when a man confesses that he doesn't

think his girlfriend is all that good-looking.The title character of Fat Pig is Helen, who infuriates the co-workers of her boyfriend, Tom. Why, says

Carter, one of LaBute's perpetual frat boys, would Tom want to be with a "beast" when he could have someone cute? Why indeed, says Jeannie, when he could

have her?Although Jeannie, Carter, and Tom are loathsome or inadequate, there seems nothing wrong with Helen, bar perky defensiveness and a tendency to

talk in patronising therapy clichés ("That's something we'll have to work on, isn't it?"). Is LaBute – plus-size himself – saying that, contrary to

popular belief, fatness does not indicate any character flaw?"Yes. Other people may consider it a problem – they think that if you wanted to be thinner,

you could, and there's also that transition we make from fat to lazy. But why are we so judgemental about other people? Helen is insecure – she says she's

'pretty OK', but that's not really OK. Not that that's anything peculiar to people who are overweight."LaBute, 46, seems comfortable in his skin. He has

the fluent speech, affable manner, and underlying firmness of someone good at his former occupation, teaching. The geniality cracks only when I say later,

that it will be hard for me to ask my next question without being insulting. "Then don't," he says. It's a command, not a suggestion. I ask it anyway.In

the preface to Fat Pig, LaBute writes that he once lost 60 pounds, only to turn into a "preening fool" who spent his time exercising rather than writing.

The anxiety that motivated his overeating – as well as his writing – had disappeared. "I'm not saying creativity is entirely linked to personal

unhappiness, but..." LaBute waves away the idea that he has to be unhappy or angry to write. "I live peacefully and manufacture the anger."Yet the preface

to Land of the Dead and Helter Skelter sizzles with resentment. LaBute rails at literary managers who laugh at the idea of putting on short plays and

"usher [him] unceremoniously out of their... shitty, overstuffed offices.""Did I say that?" he now asks mildly of the piece he wrote seven months ago.

"I'll have to go back and have a look at that. I certainly don't feel unappreciated." He smiles again. "It could have been a vintage angry year."All three

unpleasant characters in Fat Pig are strikingly immature – touchy, fretful, absurdly self-regarding. Is this a realistic portrait of young Americans? "We

allow people to stay young longer than ever – to start careers later, marry later." And to reduce complexity and ambiguity to bite-size

oversimplifications? "Oh, from the Oval Office on down. The thing that scares me most is how needy, how narcissistic we have become. People used to have

diaries that locked with little keys, and if one person read your diary it was a huge affront. Now they spew everything on to Facebook: 'Here I am. Will

you be my friend? I've never met you, but I want you to be my friend.'"LaBute's youth was marred by his parents' unhappy marriage – his father, a long-

distance truck driver, made up for his absence with harshness; he and LaBute no longer see each other. When he won a scholarship to Brigham Young, the

university of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (it has a renowned drama department), LaBute took it, though it meant he would be one of a

minuscule number of students who was not a Mormon. After a few years, he converted and married a fellow student (they separated a few years ago), a family

therapist. Did the end of his marriage affect his writing? "I probably felt more freedom to write without worrying about what she would think."Mormonism is

known for its bizarre history and practices and its bigotry. Founded in 1830 by a man who, he said, followed a vision of the Angel Moroni to dig up a set

of golden plates, it considers blasphemy the number one sin (murder is number two). Devout followers must wear the "temple garment" (LaBute says he did

not). And, although polygamy was outlawed by the church more than a century ago, some Mormons still marry the old way. Until 1978 (when the rule was

changed, but prejudice hardly vanished), it was one of the tenets of the LDS that black skin was God's curse. Brigham Young, its first president, believed

that flat noses were "the mark of Cain".So – that question. How could LaBute join such a tacky religion? He says those aspects were not part of his

decision to convert – he was attracted, rather, to the Mormons' calm, orderly lives. "I was looking for something different from what I'd grown up with,

and so many of those people were great to be around. The church may be relatively new in terms of churches, but it has so many well-educated people. As for

its history – well, what about the concept of Christ? Really! That's out there! It's no harder for me to believe in the finding of some golden plates. I

didn't know when I joined about the prejudice – that's one of the things that you find out along the way."LaBute's plays, in which sex is frankly

discussed and sin goes unpunished, were always on a collision course with Mormonism. After Bash (2000), in which Mormons murder and get away with it,

LaBute was "disfellowshipped". "I was asked to reflect on what I had done, but what they were asking of me as an author was something I couldn't do. They

were telling their members not to go to R-rated movies, and I was making them. I finally decided it was better for my kids to have a father who was a non-

Mormon rather than a bad Mormon."Of a recent news story, he says: "I think it's fascinating to see what this guy in Austria talked himself into believing,

how he thought he was behaving in his children's best interests." The thought relates to a time when LaBute worked in mental hospitals, where, he says, he

found himself asking, "What do we lock away? What are we quick to condemn? What do we not understand in the continuum of love?" As an author, LaBute is in

no doubt about his relation to the characters in Fat Pig: "I love them all."