This Is How It Goes

Infobox Play
name = This Is How It Goes


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writer = Neil LaBute
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"This Is How It Goes", is a 2005 play by Neil LaBute set in small town America, about the repercussions of an interracial love triangle.

Cody (Jeffrey Wright), once the star of the high school track team, has become a successful businessman while his wife Belinda (Amanda Peet), a former cheerleader, stays at home with the baby. When a high school acquaintance (Ben Stiller) returns to town and rents the room over their garage, he upsets the delicate balance of their relationship, raising questions about who they want to be, who they are, and what made them that way.

The play's title refers to Stiller's character's frequent breakage of drama's Fourth Wall, as he addresses the audience in between scenes by repeating "This is how it goes... or, went..." and then proceeds to comment on the preceding action or set up the next scene. Deeply in love with Belinda, or at least the Belinda he remembered, he proves to be an unreliable narrator. Occasional scenes prove not to have occurred as he relates them, and get re-acted in a style that the audience might find more reasonable or plausible.

The play debuted in the in 2005 at the Donmar Warehouse, starring Ben Chaplin, Megan Dodds and Idris Elba.

The Off-Broadway production which opened on March 11 2005 at The Public Theater, was directed by George C. Wolfe, and stared Amanda Peet, Ben Stiller, and Jeffrey Wright.