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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: reasons to be pretty Beauty and LaBute
By Harry Haun
03 Apr 2009
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reasons to be pretty stars Thomas Sadoski, Piper Perabo, Steven Pasquale and Marin Ireland; guests Gretchen Mol, Briνan O'Byrne with Bobby Cannavale; and Alexis Bledel
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Meet the first-nighters of Broadway's reasons to be pretty.
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The uncapitalized reasons to be pretty, which at long last brought the prolific screenwriter and Off-Broadway playwright Neil LaBute to The Great White Way specifically, to the Lyceum April 2, is sort of a God of Carnage, East for the low-rent twenty-somethings.
Much like the mixed-doubles warfare Yasmina Reza is waging a block west on 45th Street at the Jacobs, the foursome here go at each other hammer and tong till there's no relationship left standing. Think of it as a Kmart mark-down of Reza's ritzy elites who did make a superficial, if monumentally unsuccessful, pass at civility.
Subtlety and politeness have never been LaBute's strong suit, and that would plainly be out of place in this outsized wholesale warehouse where a couple of blue-collar buds, Greg (Thomas Sadoski) and Kent (Steven Pasquale) sweat out a bleak and boring existence, brightened a bit by the women in their respective lives. Greg has attached himself to a hairdresser, Steph (Marin Ireland), and Kent is wed to a security cop on the premises, Carly (Piper Perabo). Both unions are frail alliances.
The fifth character is the unseen catalyst a beautiful new bod in the office who has the boys panting. Her name is Crystal (possibly after the shopgirl homewrecker in The Women), and she goes the way of all flesh, ravaging relationships right and left.
Kent's crumbles from the conventional Seventh Sin, but Greg's dies a slower, subtler death, prompted by a simple remark a word, really, that comes with a death knell: Greg, speaking comparatively to Kent, says he prefers Steph's "regular" face over Crystal's gorgeous one. That assessment is overheard by Carly and dutifully reported to Steph. The play starts with Steph's snorting fire at Greg.
Again, as with God of Carnage, something small and seemingly inconsequential snowballs into an avalanche of angst and recriminations and physical violence.
At the after-party held at Hudson Terrace near the river's edge on West 46th Street, the show's director (and sometimes actor) Terry Kinney pleaded guilty to the kind of tip-of-the-iceberg maneuvering Matthew Warchus employs in God of Carnage.
"This play has always been about what people aren't saying, so it is a lot of subtext directing," Kinney confessed. "They're not saying what's really troubling them. They're not saying what is making the predicament and making them fall apart they're not saying it. They can't. The only search for growth is coming from Greg, really. One at a time, he has to leave those people because they're not growing."
It's not by accident that LaBute wrote this title all in small letters, he pointed out. "Neil put it in lower case because there is no reason to be pretty. He's diminishing it. Neil is the most collegial writer I've ever worked with. I have no idea how he can trust. I don't know if he always does I think he must but, with me, he was, like, 'If it doesn't work, throw it out. If it works, keep it.' I would say, 'I need something for this,' and the next day he would bring it in."
One of the things that didn't work or, at least, would work better for Broadway was when each of the four characters stopped the show and addressed the audience about the damaged state of their psyches at that particular point in time.
Kinney said, "We had four monologues in the earlier inception, and I always had my eye on them as something I might play with or excise in some way, but, when we decided to do that, there were parts of them that we missed a lot so we laced them into the dialogue.
"When we excised the monologues, we tried the first night without an intermission, and I hated it. I'm an intermission type of guy. I love intervals. I just love them. I love them as a theatregoer, and I love them as a person who does theatre. Back it went."
Sadoski, for one, was sad to see the monologues go: "They're actually very, very expressive pieces of writing really well-written and I do miss them, but they are published, and I think that the show will be done in the future with them in it.
"It was an artistic decision. We'd kinda been banging around with the idea for a while. Even downtown, we were talking about it. And we got into previews and said, 'Look, we're either going to do it now or we're never going to do it. So let's take a look at it and see what happens.' We did it, and it felt like we kept the pressure on. We didn't allow anybody a chance to get contemplative. I must say, Neil did an amazing job of massaging a lot of the stuff in the monologues into the dialogue."
The actor realized his character is a point of considerable audience identification for him, as well. "I relate to Greg because he is somewhat autodidactic like myself. I didn't go to college or any of that stuff, so there's a humanity in him that's searching for a way to make it all right that's something that really gets me."
Perabo, who is indeed named after Piper Laurie and, like Sadoski, originated the role Off-Broadway, marks her Broadway debut with that performance. "It's very exciting, lots of flowers," she said. She doesn't entirely share Sadoski's take on the monologues. "It's not like I miss it because I feel like when they took them out we worked really hard on making sure that part of them was still in the play."
The character of Steph, trying to balance pregnancy and her husband's infidelity, presented a real challenge to Perabo, and it affected how she approached the part.
"I like that she's instinctually smart. As an actress, I think sometimes what's really going on in the character is the thing that you're afraid of because she figures things out sorta from her guts, and that's a really fun thing to play. It makes you listen and see how you feel about everyone and sorta what you need to say about them." Continued...
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