Reasons to be Happy

PRAISE FOR THE PLAYS OF NEIL LABUTE

REASONS TO BE PRETTY

“Mr. LaBute is writing some of the freshest and most illuminating American dialogue to be heard anywhere these days … Reasons flows with the compelling naturalness of overheard conversation…. It’s never easy to say what you mean, or to know what you mean to begin with. With a delicacy that belies its crude vocabulary, Reasons to be Pretty celebrates the everyday heroism in the struggle to find out.”

—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“[T]here is no doubt that LaBute knows how to hold an audience…. LaBute proves just as interesting writing about human decency as when he is writing about the darker urgings of the human heart.”

—Charles Spencer, Telegraph

“[F]unny, daring, thought-provoking …”

—Sarah Hemming, Financial Times

IN A DARK DARK HOUSE

“Refreshingly reminds us … that [LaBute’s] talents go beyond glibly vicious storytelling and extend into thoughtful analyses of a world rotten with original sin.”

—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“LaBute takes us to shadowy places we don’t like to talk about, sometimes even to think about …”

—Erin McClam, Newsday

WRECKS

“Superb and subversive … A masterly attempt to shed light on the ways in which we manufacture our own darkness. It offers us the kind of illumination that Tom Stoppard has called ‘what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.’”

—John Lahr, The New Yorker

“[Wrecks is a] tasty morsel of a play … The profound empathy that has always informed LaBute’s work, even at its most stringent, is expressed more directly and urgently than ever here.”

—Elysa Gardner, USA Today

“Wrecks is bound to be identified by its shock value. But it must also be cherished for the moment-by-moment pleasure of its masterly portraiture. There is not an extraneous syllable in LaBute’s enormously moving love story.”

—Linda Winer, Newsday

FAT PIG

“The most emotionally engaging and unsettling of Mr. LaBute’s plays since bash … A serious step forward for a playwright who has always been most comfortable with judgmental distance.”

—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“One of Neil LaBute’s subtler efforts … Demonstrates a warmth and compassion for its characters missing in many of LaBute’s previous works [and] balances black humor and social commentary in a … beautifully written, hilarious … dissection of how societal pressures affect relationships [that] is astute and up-to-the-minute relevant.”

—Frank Scheck, New York Post

THE MERCY SEAT

“Though set in the cold, gray light of morning in a downtown loft with inescapable views of the vacuum left by the twin towers, The Mercy Seat really occurs in one of those feverish nights of the soul in which men and women lock in vicious sexual combat, as in Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“[A] powerful drama … LaBute shows a true master’s hand in gliding us amid the shoals and reefs of a mined relationship.”