You know those stressful afternoons where you’re craving on a sweet tooth and you just gotta get your fill? You go out and you get your naughty, nasty chocolate fill, because nobody can stop that itch.
This is how gritty theatre feels. It’s sharp, it’s crazy, it’s positively gooey with feelings and deep thoughts. It’s a need growing within a dry workaday life. Reasons to be Pretty certainly promises a grit-filled evening, but it’s like ordering a triple choc sundae and being served a single strawberry on a neat silver tray.
The audience is in an upstairs loft-like situation above a Fitzroy bar. There are only twenty seats or so. The lights dim, and the play opens with a bang when the wall we’ve been sitting in front of explodes open, and bam! The show is on. The play, penned by who some call American theatre’s reigning misanthrope, is about two couples in trouble and the ridiculous superficiality of man. We open with an argument between the main character and his main squeeze, and the remainder of the play’s action falls away from this scene. Grittiness impending! But…
It is hard to tell what is so dissatisfying about a piece not fully coming together.
The performances were quite lovely across the board in their naturalism and breathlessness, so it certainly was not from some lacking on the actors’ parts. The staging was interesting, as the piece jumps between workplace, home, baseball practice, shopping malls, all with that fantastic sensibility of the audience’s imagination and little else on top. Costumes, props, lighting and music all serve their purposes to make the thing alive, to create ambience. So where was it?
With all of this in mind, you would wonder if the script was missing something. Written by Neil LaBute, the play explores our reliance on physical beauty to sustain ourselves and our relationships. Reasons to be Pretty has been seen under Broadway lights and been revived in London, Australia, Canada, you name it. He, the playwright, is known for a no-holds-barred kind of banal colloquialism in his works. He is writing the people of his reality as close to real as he can manage.
Perhaps that is what ultimately drags this piece down. The language is so normalised, so realistically plotted out, that in the wrong hands these characters are just normal people. And so the power of the show must come from risks. It must come from bending the words on the page so that cruelty and sabotage and harshness reveal themselves. This Mellow Yellow Productions version shows that through almost no fault except by playing it safe it can be all too easy for Reasons to be Pretty, a play about utter ugliness, to lose its ugly. It can also be just a bit bland. There’s nothing wrong with bland, but it’s no triple choc sundae splurge.
Click here for more information and to purchase tickets to the show.
