TheatreSquared’s Reasons To Be Pretty illuminates romance and regret | OU Review

Reasons To Be Pretty

Nadine Baum Studio
505 West Spring Street
Fayetteville, AR 72701-5027
(479) 443-5600

Runs through May 1

Rating: 3.5 F%@#s out of 5

The Good:

• Delves deeply into gritty love with dark humor that exposes intimate frailties
• Great stagecraft with a minimalist set
• Greg and Steph’s intimate arguments allows us to be voyeurs to their pain

The Bad:

• Narrative becomes sluggish in the end of the first act, but gathers speed later
• Ending is anti-climactic
• Expletives in the dialogue become so rapid fire they feel redundant and forced

Greg (Dusty Brown) and Steph (Christine Sawyer Davis) are incredible when they hurl insults at one another.

When they yell, curse, catalogue the other’s faults and slap or get slapped, it lights up the stage.

Time stops and the audience experiences the best sort of theatric voyeurism when these two are together. It’s like eating popcorn in a couple’s closet, watching while they tear one another to pieces.

This is Neil Labute’s Reasons to Be Pretty where a casual comment from Greg about the “regular” beauty of his long-term girlfriend Steph sets in motion a sequence of events that leave none of the four characters in this play unscathed.

The relationships of this cast of four are illuminated in Greg’s offhand and thoughtless comment.

Greg is a bookish box packer whose job and life are simply adequate, but hardly inspiring. He drifts along in that mid-20s Hamlet role of being unable to decide and letting fate drive.

Steph wants a man to light up when he sees her. Sure, she’s a bit crazed and fond of goldfish killing to prove her point, but she’s also at a crossroads after four years with Greg and needs assurances.

Brown and Sawyer Davis portray this couple brilliantly, capturing a verbal cadence that makes most lines feel fresh and spontaneous. The script calls for so many expletives the audiences numbs quickly to it, and the actors managed to push through the language as written and put emphasis on the smart dialogue, not four-letter-nothings.

TheatreSquared’s Martin Miller took the stage just before the play to warn audience members about the adult language, offering to exchange tickets to anyone who might be offended. No one appeared to leave.

Another note about the production. Due to a computer error, most who bought tickets before the show had to wait in line 15 to 20 minutes until being escorted directly to their seats. The play got off to a late start which pushed the production, which is over two hours, to an even later ending.

“This has never happened before,” Miller said. He offered free coffee during intermission and a profuse apology before the play began.

It’s a minor thing and mostly unavoidable, but coupled with a full 10 minutes of the play being inaudible and upstaged by the pounding sound of the rains outside, it detracted slightly from the experience. Maybe Mother Nature had a point to make Friday on Earth Day.

Reasons to Be Pretty, which debuted 2008, joins The Shape of Things and Fat Pig to complete a trilogy of sorts that explore the role of physical appearance on romantic relationships.

The other couple in the play, Kent (Kris Pruett) and Carly (Rebecca Rivas), are the backdrop against Greg and Steph’s relationship.

Kent and Greg have been friends since they were children though it’s the sort of friendship based on inertia rather than sentiment or common interests. It’s at Kent and Carly’s house that the ill-fated comment is first spoken and later dutifully reported by Carly to Steph.

Rivas is given strong scenes and performs them admirable while Pruett is given a dislikeable character who becomes completely abhorrent by the end. Audience members cheered when Kent finally got his comeuppance.

Watching the evolution of Kent and Carly’s marriage, provides much of the grist used by Greg when he faces his “Now or Never” moment in the final scene.

Lebute, the play’s writer, has placed these blue-collar folks into a moment that is a lightning flash and awakening for their lives.

Lebute makes this point clear by having the bookish Greg reading Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” in the factory’s break room during the final scene. Previously, we’ve seen Greg reading first Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Johnathan Swift.

Personally, I found the climactic ending somewhat unsatisfying and abrupt after a slow build, but I can see how it might be lauded as “realistic” or “brave.”

Reasons to Be Pretty is a play that has the shell of a romantic comedy but plumbs the more rewarding depths of what it means to be merely satisfied with life and what it means to strive for more.

Christopher Spencer

Christopher Spencer, 36, is the publisher and owner of Ozarks Unbound and the food news site, The Fayetteville Food File. He is the chair of the Fayetteville Creative Economy Action Group and the social media chair of the Northwest Arkansas Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He's also the founder of WordCamp Fayetteville. You can always contact him at cspencer@ozarksunbound.com

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