Best Use of Art in a Play

In Neil LaBute's pungent black comedy The Shape of Things, which the Unicorn mounted last fall, an ambitious art student descends into a graduate thesis from hell -- at least for her boyfriend, who, unbeknownst to him, becomes her art piece. If postmodern artists can have themselves shot in the arm or freeze their blood into the shape of their head and call it performance art, what was wrong with LaBute's Evelyn reconfiguring a human being, even to the extent of making him undergo rhinoplasty and alienating those who love him? Everything.