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| Andrew Henry and Julia Grace in Reasons To Be Pretty (photo by Blueprint Studios) |
By Elissa Blake
Neil LaBute is a playwright with a reputation for giving the worst
aspects of the male psyche a voice. He’s so good at it, so unerring when it
comes to unearthing misogyny and disgust in relationships, that people – even
critics, sometimes -assume that LaBute is a monster.
But, says Chris Jones, chief theatre critic at the Chicago Tribune, who has closely observed LaBute’s career from its
beginnings in the early 1990s, “he’s really a sweetheart, a gruff sweetheart.”
“He’s had so many run-ins with the press and he often gets tarred with
the same brush as his characters,” says Jones. “It’s not fair but that’s the
way it is. He’s not one of those jerks he writes about.”
Jones says LaBute is a writer who understands the bestial side of men. “He
knows how to get at our soft underbellies – particularly when he’s talking
about how men and women relate.”
Sydney audiences have an opportunity to see that underbelly
uncomfortably exposed in LaBute’s 2008 drama Reasons To Be Pretty, which receives its Sydney premiere at the
Darlinghurst Theatre, opening tonight.
“I think it’s his most personal play,” says Jones. “It’s set in a lower
middle class milieu he really understands because he comes from it. I see the
two male characters in the play as the two sides of LaBute: the apologetic guy
atoning for everything he has done and the guy who doesn’t give a damn.”
Interesting, says LaBute, when I relay Jones’s thoughts to him. “I don’t think that that’s necessarily true though it is rooted in a
world that I grew up in, the blue-collar world. I’ve written a lot of
white-collar folks, you know, people working in offices or in higher education,
that kind of thing. I tend not to be a very autobiographical person, but I
think that Reasons To Be Pretty at
least speaks to a world that I knew firsthand.
“In college I
worked factory jobs and that was really something that I wanted to capture,
that feeling of being tired all the time.”
What about the
play being some kind of apology to women? LaBute laughs that one off.
“I remember some
of the American press saying, ‘oh, LaBute’s grown up a bit’. But I’m sure I'll
write a few more bastards before I’m through.”
Reasons To Be Pretty takes us into the world
of a young man, Greg, who works a dead-end warehouse job. We meet him just as a
new world of pain has opened up: his live-in girlfriend Steph has got word that
Greg has described her face as “regular”.
Greg attempts to defend
his choice of words. Regular. It’s a compliment. She’s not buying it. He tries
to win her back but in a
series of confrontations, Greg discovers that when it comes to looks, insults
(and even compliments) can generate wildly unpredictable responses.
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| Andrew Henry and Julia Grace |
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| Stephen James King and Andrew Henry |
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| Neil LaBute (photo by Lisa Carpenter) |
“It’s a
coming-of-age story in a way,” says LaBute. “I’ve written a lot of guys who are…
while they’re men, they’re also boys. They’re scared, and that manifests itself
in a lot of anger and fear and cowardice. But this is a story about a guy who
kind of grows up before your eyes, who starts making adult decisions. And the
biggest one is to let someone go because he knows they’re going to be better
off with somebody else than they would be with him. It’s kind of, you know, a
reverse love story.”
There is, of
course, more to it than that. LaBute’s dissection of language and body image
asks us to listen to the cruelty in everyday speech. He says it forms part of a
“loose trilogy” with his earlier play The
Shape of Things (2001) and Fat Pig
(2004).
“They all have
something to do with beauty and all of that, but I think Reasons also just speaks to how people in a relationship get along,
and how they keep going or how they might have to find, you know, either a new
language or a new partner.”
Reason to be Pretty plays at the Darlinghurst Theatre, Potts Point,
until June 3, 2012.
This story was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on May 8, 2012.
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