Boys and girls together in Reasons to Be Pretty.

Fans of gender parity should be thrilled about Neil LaBute's Reasons to Be Pretty (at SpeakEasy Stage through April 2). The famously misanthropic playwright has written female monsters before, I suppose, but none that matches up with popular modes of femininity in quite the same way his long gallery of male assholes has mapped the culture's idea of masculinity.  Indeed,  here LaBute pulls off something like the hat trick he managed in Fat Pig - where he dared the audience to honestly disagree with the cruel standards of beauty his handsome hero's world espoused. In Reasons, his female lead - named "Steph" - throws tantrums so severe, and so comically cruel, that when a character describes her with the c-word, my guess is every guy in the audience silently agreed; and yet you could sense the women in the crowd - well, they didn't think she was so bad.  Not even when she hollered like a five-year-old and broke things; not even when she struck the supposed love of her life in the face.  And yet ten to one, the boyfriends who watched it all in horror went home and told their girlfriends that yeah, they could kind of sympathize with her. You have to hand it to him - when it comes to audience-baiting, with Reasons to Be Pretty, LaBute has penned another beaut.

Meanwhile, as a gay friend of mine put it, why not call this play Reasons to Be Gay?  (Or as another quipped, "Or how about a Ryan Landry version called Reasons to Be Pussy?") To those of us with little interest in women as sex objects, the play certainly operates as a kind of SOS from the edge of a gender war we've only observed from the sidelines (if with mounting horror).  Not that there's any way we could help; and not that the emergence of this kind of harridan has gone unremarked in pop culture; late-night comedy, slapstick frat movies, and, yes, the Gold Dust Orphan shows are filled to bursting with similar gorgons.  Yet these characters are almost inevitably caricatures - cartoons undercut with irony, a form of cultural venting with no real weight behind it.  LaBute is different; he serves his female trouble up straight, no chaser.

Gisele Bündchen: the problem

Of course you could argue that "Steph" (who's a hairdresser) has been driven to violence, emotional and otherwise, by our culture's obsession with body image - like so many LaBute characters before her.  Indeed, what sets off her first tirade is a phone call from BFF "Carly," who has overhead Steph's boyfriend Greg describe her face to his buds as "regular" - although in the following context: "Okay, Steph's face may just be regular, but I love her more than anything," or something like that.  In short, Greg's a nice guy who cares for his girl, but who also knows he hasn't bedded Gisele Bündchen (at right).  And he's okay with that.  (After all, Gisele is taken.)

Not for Steph the mature comforts of romantic realism, however. Indeed, no bull ever reacted to a red flag as she does to the word "regular." Soon poor Greg is out in the cold, clutching copies of Nathaniel Hawthorne to his chest (though a college drop-out, he's still a reader) as he shuffles back and forth to his dead-end job, which seems to consist of stacking big crates in even bigger cages.

Prowling those cages with him, however, is more female trouble - "Carly" is Greg's co-worker (she holds court in the lunchroom in a guard's uniform, just so we know which gender has policing authority these days). And with the arrival of lovely Carly and her horndog husband, "Kent" on the scene - both of them quite pretty, btw - Reasons to Be Pretty begins to move beyond the horizons of Fat Pig and The Shape of Things, and get a little deeper and more ambitious than the average LaBute play.

One reason to be pretty. Photos by Craig Bailey.

For this time around, the playwright has in mind the construction of a set of interlocking variations on his usual themes. In the past, LaBute has been content to reveal how our culture of beauty victimizes those who lack it - a woman is spurned, or a man is humiliated; then he rings down the curtain. But Carly and Greg struggle just as Greg and Steph did with the "problem" of beauty - even though both of them are, indeed, beautiful (and know it). But beauty, it turns out, isn't pretty - and what's more, it's a double-edged sword. For Kent has been cheating relentlessly on Carly, with a woman even more attractive - in fact, he has finagled a move to a different work shift to give him more time to pursue his extra-curricular activities.

So even as Steph has thrown aside a worthy man who can see through the blandishments of beauty, so Carly is clinging to a cad precisely because she, too, is in its thrall. The question for Greg is: as his buddy-buddy intimacy with Kent has given him the inside scoop on his affair, should he violate the norms of gender loyalty, and give Carly the same wake-up call she gave Steph - only this time with a dose of truth far more crushing?

It's actually a rather interesting moral quandary - and a common one, too; who among us hasn't struggled with some minor variation of it? And LaBute skillfully teases it out to a satisfying climax (complete with fist-fight, here staged, ironically enough, by Angie Jepson, who plays Steph, and is also a fight choreographer). At the same time, the playwright seems unsure what to do with Steph once she's served her purpose as catalyst; he keeps bringing her back on, in scenes that linger but basically go nowhere, because for some reason he's unwilling to allow the scales to fall from her eyes (even when she hears the truth about Carly).

As Steph, Angie Jepson can't quite triumph over this lack of arc - nor does she suggest the depths of insecurity (and thwarted love for Greg) that might inspire a twinge of sympathy even among the boyfriends in the audience.  But Jepson has always given great spitfire, and she certainly crackles on here.  Meanwhile, as Greg, Andy Macdonald looks and sounds just right, but likewise doesn't really suggest the torch for Steph that he claims to be carrying; once caught up in conflict with Kent, however, Macdonald grows quite compelling.  Danielle Muehlen's Carly likewise grows in stature as the play progresses, even though its slightly schematic natures forces her into some hairpin emotional turns.  Meanwhile, as Kent, Burt Grinstead struts and preens with show-stopping confidence - but even he, I think, could tend a bit more to subtext; the cocky Kent is at heart a rather cowardly weasel, and I think he'd rather die than let anyone know that.

Paul Melone's direction was (as usual) strong and slick - although as noted, there are deeper notes to be sounded here and there than the cast seems to realize.  Meanwhile Eric Levenson's set design cleverly blended together work, home and play (just as they're all blended together for the characters), and Jeff Adelberg's lighting was appropriately industrial; the entire physical production, in fact, held to SpeakEasy's usual high standard.  That and the solid acting on offer are more than enough reasons to see Pretty.

Mormon-bashing with Neil LaBute

Playwright Neil LaBute (at left) is a special case. And perhaps a hard case, at least for a critic (like me) who shares his political and intellectual sympathies, yet still takes slight offense at his methods. I admit I keep hoping he'll dispel my doubts about his stage work as thoroughly as he did on the movie screen with his first (and best) film, In the Company of Men. But it keeps on not working out that way.

Take, for instance, Bash: Latter-Day Plays, which just concluded its run this weekend, in a solid production from Theatre on Fire. The play consists of three confessions, each from seemingly-innocent citizens - Your Friends and Neighbors, as LaBute's second film would have it; that is, if your neighbors were Mormons. (I'm not sure the last confessor is a Mormon, but she well could be.) These types are bright, attractive, wholesome, even toothsome - they're each a sparkling slice of American apple pie. Only the pie is laced with poison; beneath the crust of each piece lurks a loathsome crime, most of which go unpunished (again, only the last perpetrator faces justice - perhaps because she's not a Mormon!).

So far, so good, I suppose, and certainly LaBute is smart enough (quite smart enough) to devise an ironic, literary armature beneath the surface of each speech: while his character's actual lines are pure suburban-vanilla, indeed a brilliant parody of business- and sports-driven American prattle, the playwright weaves in clever references to the terrible archetypes of the ancient Greeks - so his girls-on-the-go and masters-of-the-universe weirdly ramify toward both banality and tragedy.

The trouble, I think, lies in their Mormonism, which seems to float as some sort of oblique counterpoint to their terrible crimes (child-killing and gay-bashing). Is LaBute whispering in our ears, "Listen, Mormons kill their children!"? He seems to want to, and not want to, at the same time - yet in the end, that's the impression he leaves.

But what would our reaction be to these plays if his characters were depicted as Jews, or Muslims? (I'll save these comparisons to religious groups which are, like the Mormons, considered "marginal" in America.) After all, there are certainly Jews and Muslims who have killed their children, and bashed gays (just as I'm sure there are Mormons who have done so). But if LaBute had styled his characters as Jews, wouldn't we clamor for some sort of justification for the seeming tie he's implying between his chosen religion and the crimes he describes?

It's true that in one of these "latter-day" plays, the offense (gay-bashing) is obviously linked to Mormon ideology (which villifies homosexuality). But alas, Orthodox Judaism does much the same thing, and so does Islam; they're just about as sexist and homophobic as Mormonism (just ask Bruno!). And LaBute doesn't seem to make an actual tie explicit between his criminals' religion and their actions. Indeed, he covers some extra bases by making his Mormons attend Boston College - just to include squeaky-clean Catholics in his campaign of innuendo, I suppose.

One could argue, of course, that LaBute is absolved of his own form of minority-bashing by the fact that he's "really" attacking that all-American wholesomeness that Mormons and conservative Catholics exploit and identify with (and of course Jews and Muslims aren't reliably Republican). That contention perhaps gets LaBute off the political hook, but does it really get him off the artistic hook? Somehow I don't think so; he still has to answer the question of precisely why these characters' religion matters to our understanding of their actions.

But to many observers in these latter days, such a question probably seems moot, because identity politics is creeping further and further into the foundations of what we imagine "aesthetics" are. (Note, for instance, the recent review of Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone that unconsciously slides from aesthetic judgment into political endorsement. And don't get me started on the relentless identity-politics babble from most of the 'cultural' blogs.) That identity politics are often steeped in what was once called "the politics of resentment" isn't lost on me, either. For LaBute is rather obviously all but dripping with resentment for his vicious college athletes and child-killing salesmen.

Tellingly, however, the playwright transcends his own yen for personal payback in the piece that floats the most free from both Mormonism and, for lack of a better word, physical attractiveness. In Medea Redux, a woman wronged recounts her resulting crime-against-nature in a truly chilling, just-the-facts-ma'am style (into a police recorder, no less) and somehow, stripped of LaBute's political agenda, the piece does brush the cold, inexplicable high places of Greek tragedy. Much of this is due to the performance of Kate Donnelly, who cannily focuses almost exclusively on the blank minutiae of her character's affect (her burning cigarette, etc.) and thus subtly conveys her inability to even articulate to herself the reasons for what she has done. As a result, at the end of her monologue, the audience does, indeed, finally feel as if they've been bashed, too.