Sparks, curses fly in resonant play about love

By Joe Brown (contact)

Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009 | 2 a.m.

For days afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about “Reasons to Be Pretty,” the latest play by Neil LaBute, at UNLV’s Black Box Theatre. And not just because I had to write about it.

First there was the amazement that playwright LaBute can build 2 1/2 hours — creating and destroying lives — from a single word. Then surprise at how funny it is, and how dark — it’s not “pretty,” certainly, but it is bleakly beautiful.

Themes and subtexts from the play continued to strike sparks against other things I listened to and read for a week afterward. And, like a Rorschach blot or a tarot card, it zeroed into a long-buried but still apparently radioactive episode in my own love life.

As always, LaBute separates the women from the boys. He’s interested here in performed masculinity and aggression, social class and pecking order, and in particular the perversely destructive power of attractiveness and attraction.

Greg and Steph begin “Reasons” with an oblique bedroom fight. Gradually we learn that Steph is reacting to a piece of gossip: Greg offhandedly agreed that another girl was “pretty,” and that Steph, his own girlfriend, is “regular.”

My female playgoing companion gasped and recoiled when she heard that, as did many others in the theater.

World War III continues at the factory where Greg works the late shift with his lunkhead friend Kent and Kent’s wife, Carly, a security guard who told Steph about the “regular” remark. Averse to exploring or even admitting their own motivations, all four characters end up, well, acting out.

Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” comes to mind, with its two couples playing vicious verbal games, avenging resentments and taking turns hurting each other. Their romantic illusions are punctured and deflated in a sloppy bedroom, in a factory breakroom and at a shopping mall food court (all suggested by the elegant revolving platforms designed by Donald C. Roose III).

Where Albee’s characters are wickedly fluent, LaBute’s people are obtusely articulate, and “Reasons” summons its frustrated force through their paucity of language. The play would be shorter by a third if you deleted the (bleeps) and [bleeps], and the words left over are too often a sequence of defensive, deflecting “ums,” “whatevers” and variations on “what did that mean?”

Guided by director Kenn McLeod, who worked from LaBute’s script for the 2008 off-Broadway staging, the Nevada Conservatory cast, all UNLV Master of Fine Arts candidates, fully inhabit their characters, rendering them sympathetic if not appealing.

As Greg, the play’s dark center of gravity, Ryan Fonville appealingly resembles comic actor Michael Ian Black, with a quick watchfulness and dark, darting eyes. Fonville’s timing in his dim-sounding but difficult dialogues is remarkably natural.

Jaime Puckett is lovely and plain, heartbreaking and infuriating as Steph, who is both victim and manipulator. Griffin Stanton-Ameisen charges Kent’s scenes with animal energy.

Between dialogues, each character steps forward for a soliloquy, clarifying or justifying his position as he understands it. The actors are stronger in their duets than in their solos, though Elisabeth Bokhoven delicately works through Carly’s delicate monologue about the literally dangerous power of beauty, and finds the heart of the play.

I’m still thinking about “Reasons to Be Pretty,” and that’s the hallmark of a good play and a strong, smart production. Experiencing “Reasons” reminded me of my simple awe of actors, of how they can create something so funny and painful from nothing, all for about 30 seconds of applause.