I’m going to make this one short—not sweet, mind you—just short as I really want this particular play to speak for itself.
Reasons To Be Pretty Happy has yet to have a fully staged production but I have no fear that this will happen soon; the first two chapters in the story of “Greg” and “Steph” and “Kent” and “Carly” were popular enough to make sure that this final third of their tale will be told. It doesn’t really matter to me what venue it’s at or what country is the first to produce it, as I’ve had great luck with many theaters and theater-makers around the world—I know that RTBPH will find a good home in the near future and the word will spread from there. In fact, I have always been a strong advocate of small and medium-sized theaters around the US and elsewhere in the world, sharing my work with various companies not because they were willing to pay for it but because they felt passionately about it and that remains the best form of payment possible.
I’ve been a fairly faithful person during my life, both in professional and personal ways; I have also occasionally obliterated that statement and hurt family and friends and associates and that sucks—I’ve been told “hurt people hurt people” and I’ve learned that the hard way on both ends. Overall, though, I have returned time and again to work with individuals and organizations not for the riches it brought me (theater is a tough way to get on the Forbes list) but for the pure and kinetic pleasure it has brought me from just doing the job.
Theaters like the Almeida in London and Throughline Artists in NYC and the Geffen in Los Angeles and Profiles in Chicago and The Actors’ Studio in St. Louis have done my plays with great regularity and in return I have given them access to my new work. Moreover, no one has been more faithful to me and my writing than my agent, Ms. Joyce Ketay, and my two publishers, Faber & Faber (edited by Mr. Steve King) and The Overlook Press (edited by Ms. Tracy Carns).
It’s nice to be connected with someone(s) in a world that is constantly in flux.
New York-based MCC Theater in particular has been good to me over the years and I have been good to them; we did 10 full productions together and easily as many benefits for the theater, usually with starry casts and expensive tickets. I did workshops for their students and talks for their patrons and together with the three artistic directors (Bernard Telsey, Robert LuPone and Will Cantler) we elevated the name and standing of the company over the course of fifteen seasons (along with a lot of other talented artists, to be sure).
And we had a great deal of fun doing it.
Those three knew me intimately and I knew them and we trusted each other to push our enterprises together to create the best theater that we could create—it culminated in a wonderful run on Broadway of Reasons To Be Pretty in 2009 and three Tony nominations for the production.
A few years later I wrote a sequel to that play, Reasons To Be Happy, and was able to direct a quartet of remarkable actors at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the summer of 2013. Bernie, Bobby, and Will were right there beside me, making sure we had a brilliant cast and a wonderful design, and the show was another success for MCC.
More shows followed and then we began to develop a final step in the journey of those four characters, one that wound up being titled Reasons To Be Pretty Happy (it was a great day when I finally stumbled upon that name).
In 2016 we planned another benefit for MCC, this time giving an advance peek of Reasons To Be Pretty Happy to a one-time audience. I directed it with the amazing cast you’ll find inside this volume and couldn’t have asked for a better, rowdier, more bittersweet night in the theater. Paul and Amber and Norbert and Jennifer were just spot-on and they read the play as if they’d been performing it for years; you would count yourself lucky to have been in the audience on that Sunday night in September.
And now the play is published and the final installment of the “Reasons” trilogy sits in your hands. It’s a good read and will be even better up on the stage one day soon. I hope you’ll share in the adventure and see how things come to a close for these four very human and very American characters. I started out the trilogy writing about beauty and relationships and I continue that here, but this time I think my palette has grown even more colorful and my interest in all four of the characters has been evened out. I use the backdrop of a “high school reunion” to investigate ideas about moving away and staying behind and lost love and male and female dynamics and lots of other things. I also try to make the audience laugh because that’s a pretty nice way to spend an evening, seeing some version of themselves up on stage doing all the dumb, sad, wise, funny, and terrible things that we as people are so completely capable of.
The play is also about friendship—how it comes and goes, waxes and wanes, and how we as individuals must find a way to live with that sobering detail. In fact, I learned a lot about who my real friends are after working on these three plays over the years and my eyes have been opened to just how often life imitates art (and vice versa).
Along the way, some of us turn out to be heroes and some of us turn out to be villains. Most of us, however, prove ourselves to be somewhere safely and sadly in the middle—nothing more than deeply flawed, well-meaning and, above all else, profoundly and utterly human.
That’s me in a nutshell anyway … and that’s on a very good day.
Neil LaBute
May 2018