…and something of a potty mouth…
[Playwright Neil] LaBute is 46 years old and built like a bear, about 6-foot-2, 280 pounds.
LaBute described his own looks to me as “absolutely average, although my weight’s become another thing. But pretty guys have this glow. No matter how bad they are, people keep going back to them. Being pretty can bring out the worst in people. I always keep an eye on the pretty guy who can hurt me.”
- Pat Jordan, “Neil LaBute Has a Thing About Beauty,” The New York Times
Kind of the anti-Seth Rogen, no?
I haven’t actually been able to participate around LaBute’s work any more than reading a few excerpts, because his brand of misogynistic misanthropy is a bit repellent, even though I’m one of those people who’s come to expect the worst from people in general.
But, hey, his latest Village-to-Broadway piece is called Reasons to be Pretty, and it sounds plum for those of us who fit the “absolutely average” description, which can’t be all that bad:
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. The performers provide such naked portraits of those insecurities that we intuit why their characters act as they do even if they do not.
- Ben Brantley, “Listen, You Brat, to Plain Truths About the Beauty Myth,” The New York Times
It’s probably not surprising, and probably almost cliché, that I’m beginning to find LaBute fascinating enough to actually start looking at his work. The fact that his two best “pretty guys” are Aaron Eckhart and Paul Rudd doesn’t hurt.