REASONS TO BE PRETTY
“What makes this play resonate is less its Big Theme—beauty (or lack thereof) and its discontents—than how that theme illuminates the insecurities of people who don’t feel they have much to offer the world.”
— Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“LaBute’s most adult story—or at least, his most touching tale—primarily because its struggling hero, if you can call him that, really does want to grow up.”
— Michael Kuchwara, San Francisco Chronicle
“The play raises provocative ideas about beauty—the significance it holds and the anxieties it creates. Even more fascinating is the underlying theme LaBute has explored ever since his breakthrough work, In the Company of Men—when men get together, the result is toxic.”
— John Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
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… In the riveting Dark House, [he] spins a tight story practically shrink-wrapped in tension.”
— Erin McClam, Newsday
“A quieter, darker, more contemplative and seemingly more personal piece of work… When they write the book on LaBute’s career, I suspect this one will reveal more about this fascinating writer than any other of his plays.”
— Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
Wrecks and Other Plays
“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 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
“Mr. LaBute here uses prototypes from Greek myths as the basis for his central story, finding Olympian extremes of behavior amid lives that seem as unthreateningly ordinary as those of your friends and neighbors (to borrow the title of a LaBute film)… [However,] the literary precedents that come most pointedly to mind aren’t Sophocles and Euripides but W. Somerset Maugham and O. Henry, old-fashioned writers of riddles of short stories in which pieces gradually click into a completed picture that whispers, ‘Gotcha!’”
— Ben Brantley, The New York Times
This Is How It Goes
“LaBute’s… most sophisticatedly structured and emotionally complex story yet, this taut firecracker of a play about an interracial love triangle may do for liberal racism what David Mamet’s Oleanna did for sexual harassment.”
— Jason Zinoman, Time Out New York
“This prolific playwright… has topped even his own scary self in this unrelentingly perilous, disgracefully likeable 90-minute marvel about race, romance and our inability to know everything about just about anything… The only unambiguous thing about this astonishing play is its quality.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
“The most frank, fearless look into race relations from a white dramatist since Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning into Butter.”
—Elysa Gardner, USA Today
Fat Pig
“The most legitimately provocative and polarizing playwright at work today.”
— David Amsden, New York
“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. [It] demonstrates 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 Shape of Things
“LaBute is the first dramatist since David Mamet and Sam Shepard—since Edward Albee, actually—to mix sympathy and savagery, pathos and power… The Shape of Things… continues his obsession with the power games men and women play.”
— Donald Lyons, New York Post
“LaBute… continues to probe the fascinating dark side of individualism… [His] great gift is to live in and to chronicle that murky area of not-knowing, which mankind spends much of its waking life denying.”
— John Lahr, The New Yorker
“Shape… is LaBute’s thesis on extreme feminine wiles, as well as a disquisition on how far an artist… can go in the name of art… Like a chiropractor for the soul, LaBute is looking for realignment, listening for the crack.”
— John Istel, Elle