BROADWAY REVIEWS
Grease
Gypsy
Hairspray
In the Heights
Jersey Boys
Legally Blonde
Lion King, The
Little Mermaid, The
Mamma Mia!
Mary Poppins
Monty Python's Spamalot
Phantom of the Opera, The
Rent
South Pacific
Spring Awakening
Wicked
Xanadu
Young Frankenstein
OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS
COMING UP:
Sept 18 - A Tale Of Two Cities
Sept 25 - Equus
Oct 1 - The Seagull
Oct 2 - To Be Or Not To Be
Oct 5 - 13
Oct 7 - Man For All Seasons
Oct 16 - All My Sons
Nov 13 - Billy Elliot
Nov 20 - Dividing the Estate
Dec 11 - Pal Joey
Dec 14 - Shrek: The Musical
| Show | Did He Like It? |
Synopsis | |
 |
 |
|
America’s obsession with physical beauty is confronted head-on as Greg’s tight-knit social circle is thrown into turmoil when his offhanded remarks about a female coworker’s pretty face (and his girlfriend’s lack thereof) get back to said girlfriend. |
Listen, You Brat, to Plain Truths About the Beauty Myth
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 3, 2008
A firestorm of abuse and invective, hot enough to scald the hide off a thick-skinned man, blasts through the opening minutes of “Reasons to Be Pretty,” the surprising new play by Neil LaBute that opened Monday night in a superbly acted production at the Lucille Lortel Theater.
Even audience members accustomed to the outright nastiness of much of Mr. LaBute’s previous plays will find themselves squirming as a young woman (played by Alison Pill) attacks her boyfriend, at ear-scraping volume, with every epithet within her vocabulary. LaBute characters are rarely happy campers, yet none of them have ever been so unconditionally, uncontrollably, overwhelmingly angry as this one.
But Mr. LaBute has a bigger surprise in store than this opening fireworks display.
People will continue to erupt and lash out, not to mention punch one another bloody, in “Reasons to Be Pretty,” which is directed with a fine hand by Terry Kinney. But the authorial force that drives them is one I have never encountered in a work from this writer: Neil LaBute, the harsh and unforgiving chronicler of men’s darkest impulses, is making nice.
Mr. LaBute’s earlier works, both dramas (“bash,” “The Mercy Seat”) and screenplays (“In the Company of Men,” “Your Friends and Neighbors”), have been shaped by a glaring judgmental vision of the ways men and women (especially men) use and hurt one another. If there was comic glee in these pieces, there was also puritanical contempt.
“Reasons to Be Pretty” is less condemning than questioning. And it’s shot through with compassion for four young working-class friends and lovers who are starting to realize that they are trapped in dead-end lives. The four immensely talented cast members — Piper Perabo, Thomas Sadoski, Pablo Schreiber and Ms. Pill — respond to this newly found empathy with some of the most sensitively shaded performances in town.
It’s not all that easy to smile after more than a decade of professional scowling. “Reasons to Be Pretty” has an adolescent awkwardness at times that is the opposite of the contrived jigsaw-puzzle precision associated with Mr. LaBute.
In a playwright’s note in the program, he writes that this is “the first coming-of-age story I’ve written.” And he doesn’t avoid the clichés or mistiness of that genre in recounting the sentimental education of Greg (Mr. Sadoski), an autodidactic warehouse worker trying to figure out who he is in the wake of a brutal breakup with Steph (Ms. Pill).
But Mr. LaBute has also released himself from the obligations of feeding a single moral theme and a corkscrew-turn plot leading to a “gotcha” ending. And he stretches like someone who has taken off a tight girdle. The relatively easygoing sprawl of “Reasons to Be Pretty” allows his characters to talk naturally and at leisure as they ponder their own often less-than-pretty natures.
In the course of these conversations, you realize anew what a sensitive ear Mr. LaBute has for the uncommonness in common speech — of the individuality within everyday language — and for how people of all levels of education and eloquence use words as instruments of power. Those four-letter missiles that Steph hurls at Greg in the first scene are only the flashiest examples of words as defensive artillery. There are far more subtle variations to follow.
What provoked that initial tirade, by the way, was Steph’s hearing that Greg, in comparing his girlfriend with a pretty new employee where he works, has described her face as “regular” looking. An innocuous adjective, you might think, but it’s potent enough to make Steph walk out in high dudgeon on a four-year relationship.
At the warehouse Greg sifts through his life with Steph in conversations with Kent (Mr. Schreiber) and Carly (Ms. Perabo), a security guard and Kent’s wife. That no one could call Carly, a knockout blonde, regular-looking becomes the subject of further ruminations on the nature and importance of beauty.
“Reasons to Be Pretty” is the final installment of a trilogy by Mr. LaBute devoted to the contemporary obsession with physical appearance, following the abrasive “Shape of Things” and the gentler (and superior) “Fat Pig.” The subject is explored here in four monologues, one per character and all strong, except for a concluding speech by Greg that sums up the-lessons-he-has-learned way too sweetly and glibly. All of these pale, though, next to a rivetingly uncomfortable scene in which Steph reads aloud — quite audibly, in a food court at a mall — a catalog of everything that’s wrong with Greg’s appearance.
It’s telling that the person you feel most sorry for here is Steph, the attacker. What makes this play resonate is less its Big Theme — beauty (or lack thereof) and its discontents — than how that theme illuminates the insecurities of people who don’t feel they have much to offer the world. The performers provide such naked portraits of those insecurities that we intuit why their characters act as they do even if they do not.
Ms. Pill, who proved herself a master of emotional rawness in “Blackbird,” is again commandingly intense and authentic. Ms. Perabo, known largely for screen work (“The Prestige,” “Cheaper by the Dozen”), cannily finds the soft center within Carly’s sharp edges.
Mr. Schreiber (of “Awake and Sing!” and “Dying City”) confirms his great gift for making unsympathetic characters not just believable but also understandable. And Mr. Sadoski anchors the play’s most generic (and therefore toughest) role with unfaltering emotional clarity.
Mr. Schreiber’s character is in the obnoxious mold of the prototypical LaBute man, an eternal brat stranded in obstreperous, greedy childhood. Here he is set up a bit too pointedly as an effigy to be knocked down, and the play includes a scene in which Mr. LaBute’s sensitive new hero (whom the playwright has described as “one of the few adults I’ve ever tackled”) takes on his insensitive friend (and alter ego) mano a mano.
But since Mr. LaBute is in such a forgiving mood, we should be, too.
Steph tells Greg many times that he doesn’t listen to what other people say. “Reasons to Be Pretty” is in part about learning to listen. If it stumbles in illustrating this lesson, it also opens its author’s ears to a new, richly human music.
REASONS TO BE PRETTY
By Neil LaBute; directed by Terry Kinney; sets by David Gallo; costumes by Sarah J. Holden; lighting by David Weiner; music and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen; production manager, B. D. White. Presented by the MCC Theater, Robert LuPone and Bernard Telsey, artistic directors; Blake West, executive director. At the Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, West Village; (212) 279-4200. Through July 5. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
WITH: Piper Perabo (Carly), Alison Pill (Steph), Thomas Sadoski (Greg) and Pablo Schreiber (Kent).
Sign up to get email updates of Broadway and Off-Broadway reviews from DidHeLikeIt.com. You can be the first to find out if He liked it!
COMING UP: |
||
|
||
