“Mr. LaBute is more relaxed as a playwright than he’s ever been. He is clearly having a good time revisiting old friends … you’re likely to feel the same way … the most winning romantic comedy of the summer, replete with love talk, LaBute-style, which isn’t so far from hate talk …”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“These working-class characters are in fine, foul-mouthed voice, thanks to the scribe’s astonishing command of the sharp side of the mother tongue. But this time the women stand up for themselves and give as good as they get.”
—Marilyn Stasio, Variety
“LaBute has a keen ear for conversational dialogue in all its profane, funny and inelegant glory.”
—Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
“LaBute … nails the bad faith, the grasping at straws, the defensive barbs that mark a tasty brawl.”
—Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post
“… intense, funny, and touching … In following up with the lives of his earlier characters, LaBute presents another compassionate examination of the ways people struggle to connect and try to find happiness.”
—Jennifer Farrar, The Associated Press
“… terrifically entertaining.”
—Philip Boroff, Bloomberg
“[A] triumph … always electric with life. LaBute has a terrific way of demonstrating that even in their direst spoken punches … fighting lovers are hilarious…. completely convincing.”
—David Finkle, Huffington Post
“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
“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
“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
“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
“LaBute gets inside the emptiness of American culture, the masquerade, and the evil of neglect. The Distance From Here, it seems to me, is a new title to be added to the short list of important contemporary plays.”
—John Lahr, The New Yorker
“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.”
—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
“LaBute is the first dramatist since David Mamet and Sam Shepard—since Edward Albee, actually—to mix sympathy and savagery, pathos and power.”
—Donald Lyons, New York Post
“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 of the soul, LaBute is looking for realignment, listening for a crack.”
—John Istel, Elle
“The three stories in bash are correspondingly all, in different ways, about the power instinct, about the animalistic urge for control. In rendering these narratives, Mr. LaBute shows not only a merciless ear for contemporary speech but also a poet’s sense of recurring, slyly graduated imagery … darkly engrossing.”
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times