From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

My guest, Neil Lebutte, a fellow Detroiter, like myself, was, I guess it's

11 years ago now since your first film since in The Company of Men. And in the interim,

you've done a number of plays in films, your friends and neighbors, Nurse Betty, I met

you at the Cannes Film Festival. We're here to talk about your new play, Some Girls. First of all, Neil, thanks for doing the show.

Oh, pleasure. Thank you.

And the thing I want to talk to you about before anything is just in watching the stage shows versus the movies,

I'm really struck by how incredibly territorial the work it is for you.

I mean, it's always about people sort of staking claim on a piece of view of literal or figurative territory and marking that.

And some girls really fits into that, doesn't it?

Very much so.

Yeah, I think that it's very much about, you know, one room that shifts metamorphosis into, you know, four different hotel rooms, but very similar.

And it becomes a kind of battleground for this this male,

female, gender war that's going on. Which is a bit more insidious and less kind of direct than the men have been in some of your other pieces, certainly less, less so than the movies. He's a bit

more sort of wheedling and cajoling and insidious and not specifically clear.

I think that's probably true.

Not as perhaps outright cruel as some of the men have been, but certainly as weak.

I think there's a thematic threat of weakness through a kind of study of weakness on my part with men, whether

it's been in film and somebody else's material and being drawn to that or just my own,

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