'reasons to be pretty' at Profiles: Neil LaBute's stand-in tries and tries to explain himself
THEATER REVIEW: "reasons to be pretty" ★★½ Through March 13 at Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway; Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes; Tickets: $35-$40 at 773-549-1815 or www.profilestheatre.org
At the top of Neil LaBute's succulent “reasons to be pretty,” a young woman named Steph gets as mad as any young woman gets in any of LaBute's plays, even though they almost all contain lousy dudes worthy of female scorn. In this case, an offensive LaButian male has made the mistake of telling a buddy that (to paraphrase), while his girlfriend is just great and all that stuff, she does not possess what one would call a really cute face.
This indiscretion got reported back to its subject. And although the hero — maybe antihero — of LaBute's play tries to explain away what he thinks was surely a minor rhetorical indiscretion — there being nothing wrong, he insists, with a “regular face” — he finds himself in a situation from which it is well nigh impossible to recover.
Although Greg (played by Darrell W. Cox) is a stock guy in a big-box store (the rest of the play involves a also-troubled relationship between Kent and Carly, two married fellow workers), it's not hard to see this character as a stand-in for LaBute himself. Here's a writer who has often been put in a defensive position of apologizing for the treatment of women in his plays and being obliged to remind people that he is merely sticking real-life men on stage. “Reasons to be pretty,” which opened last Thursday at the Profiles Theatre, is thus LaBute's most reflective play to date and an uncommonly wise and direct drama about gender relations among the great swaths of ordinary citizens who inhabit exurban America.