reasons to be pretty

*** (...out of five stars)

MCC

Ah the world of Labute... where all the women are hysterical bitches and all the men are douche-bags. For those of you who like some yelling in your plays, there's quite a bit of it in this 4 character play about a dude who doesn't think his girlfriend isn't particularly pretty. Though not destined to be a classic, I did find the play to be consistently engaging and I got a little schadenfreude thrill from all of the backstabbing. Actors heads up- there are quite a few two character scenes and monologues that would probably work well in scene study. I've got major theater crushes on Allison Pill and Pablo Schreiber and they're both doing some great work here. Can't wait to see what they do next.

Reasons To Be Pretty

photo: Joan Marcus

I usually like Neil LaBute's plays but he has, of course, had his share of bummers. None yet that I have either seen or read, however, to rival Reasons To Be Pretty, a woefully thin and unfocused effort in which LaBute aims to depict a main male character who matures emotionally past the playwright's typical testosterone-pumped overgrown adolescents. (The character gets a best bud who more than picks up that slack: the guy's misogyny and duplicity are so over the top that he plays like a failed parody of a LaBute man.) The main character's revelations near the end of the play, spelled out for us in a direct address monologue which unthinkably begins with "So what have I learned from all this?", aren't any more insightful than "beauty is subjective". The play manages to be banal, superficial and aggressively repellent all at once, and also features one of the weakest monologues I have heard in some time. (It's about the hardship of being physically beautiful, which turns out to be that guys might try to hit on you in the supermarket.) Committed performances by Alison Pill and Thomas Sadoski provide an occasional illusion of depth, but the material is skin-deep.

Reasons To Be Pretty

Photo/Joan Marcus

Reasons To Be Pretty is certainly the laziest of Neil LaBute's three body-image themed plays (also The Shape of Things and Fat Pig). Thomas Sadoski comes across genuinely as Greg, but the other three actors seem to just be working on him, with no regard or care for self. The fact that Alison Pill is forced to emote for cheap entertainment is a real waste of talent (that she still almost manages to pull off), though no surprise from Pablo Schreiber, whose dismissive veneer makes him a perfectly unflinching actor for LaBute's plays. Piper Perabo, on the other hand, comes as a real surprise, interjecting rocky subtext into the obvious and polished dialogue. Right now, the show needs its four exceptionally weak monologues, for they show us what the actors are capable of, but LaBute would do well to deepen his characters--then he might be able to trust them a little more. Don't get me wrong: artifice, made sharp enough, can still be highly entertaining--even blanks pop when they go off. I was just hoping for more.

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The Actor's NightmareThe Real Inspector Hound

I had a blast at this double-bill of theatre-related one-acts at T. Schreiber Studio. First, Christopher Durang's delightful absurdity in which a hapless accountant is mistaken for an actor and forced to fend for himself on stage in front of an audience. The play is my preferred brand of hilarious, as the fish-out-of-water accountant (Michael Black) flops about trying to fake his way through a play that morphs Coward, Shakespeare and Beckett, and I don't have a single serious complaint about this production, which has been well-paced for madcap fun and is energized by Black's endearing performance. Second, Tom Stoppard's barbed comedy in which two drama critics critique (and eventually enter) a run-of-the-mill whodunit. It's not as successfully realized in this production as the Durang piece - not all of the performances in the play within the play are sufficiently heightened enough - but it's good, snickering fun anyhow, and the actors playing the critics (Julian Elfer and Rick Forstmann) are devilishly spot-on. Special mentions: Nan Wray, appearing in both plays and pitch-perfect in each, and George Allison, who's come up with yet another impressive set design for the modest T. Schreiber space.

Blink

The fourth character in Blink, the absent father, is represented by an empty hospital bed. The characters talk about him, about the way he sometimes blinks to communicate. Now, the father has little to do with the play, but that idea of talking laboriously through blinks stuck with me when trying to describe Ian Rowlands's play, for that's how it comes across. Blink's series of artificial monologues and scenes are rarely linked together by the aggressive push-and-pull energy it needs, and so the words all come across as deliberate and overdone. There are some good moments from Sion Pritchard, who plays an abused son, but only when he's speaking directly to Rhian Blythe, who plays his first love. It's a shame so much of the play focuses on things other than that relationship, for without focus, the blinks mean nothing.

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Artefacts

Mike Bartlett's new play, Artefacts, is clever in the best possible way: it turns shallow thoughts into deep observations about character, and pulls apt cultural metaphors out of those depths. By grounding itself in a family drama—a spoiled British girl learns she is half-Iraqi—it avoids the pitfalls of political drama and speaks personally rather than preachingly. It's also a great demonstration of the old maxim about writing: "Show, don't tell." The stream-of-consciousness of a typical, selfish teenage girl, allows him to tell plenty, but the telling itself shows us even more about ourselves.

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