Reasons To Be Pretty

I've said this time and time again, whenever a theatre company in town does a Neil Labute play, I simply must go see it. The last one I checked out was Autobahn which was just a small collection of vignettes. So it was a pleasant surprise that my first show of the year was Fighting Chance Productions' staging of Labute's Reasons To Be Pretty.

And in quintessential Labute form, we are drawn into his world of unlikeable assholes and the darker side of human kind. In Reasons To Be Pretty, we join a couple who are in the midst of a heated argument over what the boyfriend had said about the girlfriend's face. Along for the bumpy ride are the couple's co-workers, the handsome jock asshole Kent and his pretty snitch wife Carly. They all have their own reasons for doing what they do, with insecurity being the main one, from what I could gather.

Bound to provoke, Reasons to Be Pretty will definitely get you all fired up! And isn't that what theatre is here to do? To move us, to create a reaction, whether it be good or bad?

Reasons To Be Pretty is playing now to February 1 at the Havana Cafe on Commercial Drive.