About the Play:

Reasons to Be Pretty has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, Female/Male Scenes, and Male/Male Scenes.

Reasons to Be Pretty is a full-length comedic drama by Neil LaBute. What does it mean to be pretty? Do you really need someone to validate your appearance? Greg makes an off-handed remark calling his co-worker "pretty" and his girlfriend "regular." The unflattering comparison makes its way back to the girlfriend and throws his tight-knit social circle into turmoil. Neil LaBute tackles our obsession with physical beauty head-on in a work nominated for multiple Tony and Drama Desk Awards.

Reasons to Be Pretty is a bristling comic drama that puts the final ferocious cap on Neil LaBute's trilogy of plays that began with The Shape of Things and Fat Pig. America's obsession with physical beauty is confronted headlong in this brutal and exhilarating work. Greg's tight-knit social circle is thrown into turmoil when his offhand remarks about a female coworker's pretty face and his own girlfriend Steph's lack thereof get back to Steph. But that's just the beginning. Greg's best buddy, Kent, and Kent's wife, Carly, also enter into the picture, and the emotional equation becomes exponentially more complicated. As their relationships crumble, the four friends are forced to confront a sea of deceit, infidelity, and betrayed trust in their journey to answer that oh-so-American question: How much is pretty worth? A hopelessly romantic drama about the hopelessness of romance, Reasons to Be Pretty is a gorgeous play.

Reasons to Be Pretty premiered in 2008 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre off Broadway in New York City's Greenwich Village and won the Broadway.com Audience Choice Award for Favorite New Off Broadway Play. It transferred to Broadway's Lyceum Theatre in 2009 and received a Tony nomination for Best Play. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"Mr. LaBute is writing some of the freshest and most illuminating American dialogue to be heard anywhere these days." — New York Times

"No contemporary writer has more astutely captured the brutality in everyday conversation and behavior: That kind of insight requires sensitivity and soul-searching." — USA Today

"It is tight, tense and emotionally true, and it portrays characters who actually seem part of the world that the rest of us live in." — Time Magazine

"The playwright delivers the goods, in a work that's lively and compulsively watchable and that offers a fresh take on the eternal matter of achieving adulthood." — The Record

About the Playwright:

Neil LaBute is an award-winning American playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter. His plays include bash, Reasons to be Pretty (Tony Award nominated for best play), In a Forest, Dark and Deep, and Reasons to be Happy. His films include In the Company of Men (New York Critics' Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmaker Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival), Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things, Some Velvet Morning, and Dirty Weekend. He is a 2013 recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.