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A play about the historical provocateur Joe Hill paired with a play by Utah-schooled dramatic provocateur Neil LaBute together signal new directions for the development program at Utah Shakespeare Festival.

For the first time, these two plays receiving staged readings this month at the Cedar City company will go on to Utah premieres. Utah playwright Debora Threedy's "One Big Union" will be produced at Salt Lake City's Plan-B Theatre Nov. 10-20, while LaBute's contemporary drama "How to Fight Loneliness" will receive a regional premiere at USF next summer.

And with these two very different plays, the company's long-running New American Playwrights Project is being rebranded Words3. For returning theatergoers, attending the readings should feel familiar, "but it represents a step up in our commitment to the Shakespeares of the future," says Joshua Stavros, USF's media and public-relations manager. "We are deeply committed to being part of the conversation about new works."

Threedy's script explores Hill's personal story, focusing on his relationships with several women, his long-lasting influence as a songwriter, as well as the bungled defense at his trial. The Swedish immigrant and union organizer was famously executed by a Utah firing squad on Nov. 19, 1915, after being convicted of murdering a Salt Lake grocery man, drawing national attention.

In some ways, "One Big Union" functions as a love story to America's protest movement. "All the things that Joe Hill and the Wobblies were bothered about at the turn of the 19th-to-20th century are still relevant at the turn of the 20th-to-the-21st century. All of it," says Threedy, the playwright who is also a longtime University of Utah law professor. She adds: "It was the most romantic labor union you could ever imagine. They were such dreamers, they were poets, they were musicians."

The play features Hill's songs, which are notable for their simplicity, says Michael Bahr, USF's education director who helped select this year's plays. "That's the magic. Anybody can sing the songs. I don't think the average Utahn knows the story of Joe Hill, so the art is literally being used to teach us."

Threedy says Hill's labor songs are irreverent, as well as relevant. "How I explain them to people is he was writing the 'Saturday's Voyeur' of the 1910s," crafting new lyrics set to popular melodies, she says.

LaBute's "How to Fight Loneliness" centers on a married couple who invite a man the wife knew casually back in high school to help them solve an unsolvable problem. In unexpected ways, the play challenges the idea of a woman's right to make complicated decisions about her health. "I find all three of these people are asking for something that is relatively reasonable, when I look at it from a certain point of view," says LaBute in a phone interview after returning to New York from directing a German production of "Uncle Vanya."

In the beginning, the story focuses on the couple's relationship, which prompts them to ask big questions of each other. "Once you drop that other character in the piece, it certainly becomes another world," LaBute says, adding that each of the three acts explores the dramatic conflict in a different way.

Words3 shows will be staged in the company's just-opened 200-seat black-box theater, and LaBute's famously provocative language won't be censored. Instead, the company will offer a content advisory for the work by the playwright, noted during his career for adult themes and language in films such as "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends & Neighbors" and plays including "The Mercy Seat" and "Fat Pig."

"For the first time, we're saying there's an f-word in this, and it's not being removed," Bahr says. "Now that we have a space we don't have to sell 900 seats to, this is where we can develop the appetite and taste for new works."

USF artistic director David Ivers, in a statement, referred to LaBute's muscular and deft use of language as well as his tightly conflicted characters, saying his work "will lend boldness, gravitas and a fresh voice to our 2017 slate of programming."

USF's invitation serves as a homecoming for the playwright, who crafted early scripts while working the night shift at Provo's Utah State Hospital as a theater student at Brigham Young University.

In Provo, LaBute studied with theater professor Charles Metten and was a graduate assistant for him in the early 1990s. Metten nurtured and protected his student's work despite anger from school officials. (Famously, authorities once locked a theater to prevent a showing of LaBute's work, but Metten calmly fetched a janitor to cut open the locks and the show went on.) Metten taught at the school for 37 years; he was hired as a dean at Southern Utah University upon retirement and appointed head of USF's play development program in 2004.

"This is full circle for me, to come back to work with the guy who really inspired me — or saw what was really there in terms of my talent," LaBute says of Metten. "He could see through all that stuff I was trying to wrestle with. He was just a great advocate, the best kind of teacher. He never tried to show me how he would have directed something or written something. He tried to see what I tried to say. And that's a lesson I carried over as a teacher or still today as a director."

He finds Metten's work ethic inspiring, too, as the twice-retired professor is still devoted to theater. For his part, Metten refers to LaBute as an "American Ibsen." In a 1999 profile, the New Yorker's John Lahr explored how LaBute's Sundance Film Festival-lauded 1997 film, "In the Company of Men," earned him the title of "the angriest white male." LaBute "courts provocation not for the sake of shock but to make an audience think against its own received options," Lahr wrote.

This fall, LaBute's "Van Helsing," a 13-episode TV show featuring a female warrior combating a world of vampires, will debut on the Syfy cable channel. That, too, is another nod to his past, he says, as he once worked on an adaptation of "Dracula" with a female character as an assignment for Metten back in his BYU days. —

Words3

'One Big Union' • Staged reading Aug. 26. Utah playwright Debora Threedy's play is directed by Jerry Rapier and features actor Roger Dunbar, who will also appear in Plan-B Theatre's November production in Salt Lake City.

'How to Fight Loneliness' • Staged readings Aug. 19, 20 and 27

Where • Eileen and Allen Anes Studio Theatre, 299 W. Center St., Cedar City

Also • Neil LaBute will be featured in a Q&A Saturday, Aug. 20, at 5:30 p.m., followed by a book signing

Tickets • $10; bard.org, 800-PLAYTIX (752-9849) or at the door