Reasons to be pretty

reasons to be pretty
Title treatment for the Broadway production
Written by	Neil LaBute
Date premiered	2008
Place premiered	Lucille Lortel Theater, Greenwich Village, NY
Original language	English
Setting	The outlying suburbs. Not long ago.
Official site

reasons to be pretty is a play by Neil LaBute, his first to be staged on Broadway. The plot centers on four young working class friends and lovers who become increasingly dissatisfied with their dead-end lives and each other. Following The Shape of Things and Fat Pig, it is the final installment of a trilogy that focuses on modern-day obsession with physical appearance.

Produced by MCC Theater and directed by Terry Kinney, the play premiered at the Off-Broadway Lucille Lortel Theater on June 2, 2008 and ran through July 5. The cast included Piper Perabo, Pablo Schreiber, Alison Pill, and Thomas Sadoski.

Ben Brantley of The New York Times thought the play "has an adolescent awkwardness at times that is the opposite of the contrived jigsaw-puzzle precision associated with Mr. LaBute... 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... 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... 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."

The Broadway production, also directed by Kinney, began previews at the Lyceum Theatre on March 13, 2009, opened on April 2, 2009 and closed on June 14, 2009 after 85 performances. The cast included Off-Broadway cast members Thomas Sadoski and Piper Perabo joined by Marin Ireland and Steven Pasquale.