NEIL LaBute likes exploring private spaces. Especially, it seems, if the controversial American playwright, screenwriter and director can show off what goes on in those spaces in public. Most of LaBute's plays seem to hanker after intimacy, giving serious voice to what's too often left unspoken in relationships and every attempt at establishing one. LaBute's first hit was called In The Company of Men for good reason. For LaBute, given the right context, even a simple car journey can become a matter of life and death.

As road trips go, Autobahn, LaBute's 2003 compendium of in-motion exchanges which receives its Scottish premiere next week by the new Theatre Jezebel company, is no joy-ride. Whether dealing with teen agers on a first date, over-anxious parents or suspicious couples on their way home after one has been going behind the other's back on a business trip, the six pieces skirt around the danger zone of everyday lives in motion with a melancholy candour that's typical of LaBute's world.

"There's a kind of desperation to connect, " LaBute says of Autobahn, "and in a car there's no escape. It can be a huge space or a small space, depending on what's going on inside the cab. It's kind of like a submarine in that way. That's the whole world of car culture. You can feel like there's a whole world between you or like you're inches away."

That tension between intimates in close-up spaces is something LaBute clearly draws from his own life.

"Early on, " he remembers, "I had a father who one day could be angry, and the next he could be gregarious and outgoing, and you were never sure which one you were going to get. That sense of the uncertainty principal has fed into what I do in the theatre, and it can divide both audiences and critics."

As he hints, LaBute's work has come under fire from all sides. His play, Fat Pig, written after Autobahn and recently seen in London, saw him accused of misogyny. This is nothing new for LaBute, who has been fending off such brickbats ever since he began writing for the stage at Brigham Young University in Utah. It was here LaBute joined the Church of Latter Day Saints, whose followers are more commonly known as Mormons. LaBute premiered In The Company of Men at Brigham Young in 1993 before directing the feature film version four years later.

"A lot has been documented about my male characters, " he says without any defensiveness, "but for someone who's been called a misanthrope and a misogynist, I'm actually harder on men than I am on women. They, and we, keep things back compared to women. With men, you're thinking, if only they could have been braver and asked that one more question, their whole lives could be different. You can see that in Autobahn, where, between the men and the women, there's this void between them."

LaBute originally wrote the pieces that make up Autobahn to be performed at one of the glitzy benefit shows that keep the American theatre scene financially afloat.

"It was never intended to be a cycle in any way, " LaBute points out, "and it was only when I'd written all of the plays that I realised what I had. I'd written Bash, which was three monologues, and I wanted to see how long I could keep actors in seats. A benefit show is a different kind of thing from a regular theatre audience. It's a very friendly audience, and I wanted to keep things fairly simple for that.

"In some of the pieces, although there are two actors onstage, only one of them talks. Put them in a moving car so no-one can get away, and that becomes really interesting. The person not talking is just staring at the person talking, and it's like the person not talking is boring a hole into the other person's head.

"So I wanted to see what actors saying nothing can do, and at the benefit, Philip Seymour Hoffman asked for the part of the husband who didn't say anything. There was a really good actress playing the wife, but Hoffman was so in the moment you couldn't take your eyes off him. It's amazing what you can do with no lines."

This is clearly LaBute the director talking, the man who directed Rachel Weisz on stage and screen in The Shape of Things, cast glamour model Kelly Brook in Fat Pig and is preparing for a West End production of his recent Broadway hit, Reasons To Be Pretty, in which pop star Lily Allen is reported to be starring. These three plays form a loose trilogy by LaBute that looks at the importance of physical appearance. Again, this has seen their author, who long ago angered his now former church with Bash, pilloried for their content.

"There's nothing new I haven't heard, " LaBute says. "I stand by the work and I say, if it's misogynist, then show it to me. The fact that a woman can be a victim doesn't make me a misogynist. I'm not a documentarian, but it's a fact that it can happen.

"I once had an actress say to me that she felt her character was stupid because her husband was cheating. I said to her that if she didn't know, she wasn't stupid. But if she did know, and then didn't do anything about it, then she's stupid.

"Not every woman is smart. Not every man is smart. I'm not trying to change perceptions of them. I'm just trying to tell an interesting story, but some people seem to think that if I'm not writing a smart, sexy woman, then that's wrong somehow."

LaBute's most recent work, Some White Chick, has just finished a run at Southwark Playhouse as part of a quartet of new plays under the umbrella title of Grand Guignol, and which also featured pieces by Mark Ravenhill and Anthony Neilson. Some White Chick isn't LaBute's first brush with the horror genre.

His 2006 remake of cult film, The Wicker Man, originally set on a Scottish island but Americanised by LaBute with Nicolas Cage in the lead role, was regarded on its release as a disaster. LaBute, however, remains sanguine about the film.

"My experience on the movie was good, " he maintains, "but it got a hard time when it came out. It was only then I realised it was everybody's favourite horror film. I learned a lot of lessons from that, and took a lot of hard bounces. But that's part of the work. You have to take the public knocks."

Informed of a recent attempt to stage The Wicker Man which fell at the final hurdle, and LaBute's enthusiasm for the material returns. "It's so right for a stage musical, " he says. "It would be a fantastic opportunity, and I would love to see what someone did with that."

Ask LaBute if he might just be that someone, and he laughs in a once-bitten, twice-shy kind of way. "It might be a while before I go near those ashes again, ' he deadpans. "They're still smouldering."