Discovering Theatre Around You: Critiquing/Reviewing

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America's Sharpest Social Observer Takes A Good Look At Looking Good. No one holds a mirror up to human nature like Neil LaBute, the brutally honest, brilliantly hilarious playwright behind such hit indie films as The Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors and Nurse Betty. While his scripts and screenplays have been redefining the dialogue of contemporary America, his observations on sexual relations have paid special attention to our obsession with physical beauty. The result has been three groundbreaking comedies that DTC has organized into a unique trilogy which will inaugurate the Wyly's Studio Theatre. The Beauty Plays include The Shape of Things, Fat Pig and, fresh from its Broadway production, the regional premiere of reasons to be pretty, a New York Times Critics Pick and one of the Top Ten Plays of 2008 according to both TIME Magazine and the Associated Press. This is the first time any theater has produced all three plays in one season, providing Dallas audiences with a unique opportunity to experience LaBute's funny, colorful and painfully honest work. Whether you see one or see all three, The Beauty Plays promise a rousing, razor-sharp look at love and relationships through the eyes of one tough beholder. The Beauty Plays, the season's only production in the intimate 100-seat Studio Theatre, are sure to sell out and get all of Dallas talking!

Opinion: (Lawson Dallasobserver.com)

The Beauty Plays: Theater followers who can endure profanity owe it to themselves to glimpse all of them. In these plays in writing over the course of a ten years, the playwright displays how much kind he can wrangle from alike setups: Two men and two women salary not a assault but a conflict of the sexes, throughout which one of the men discovers a precious but exorbitant lesson. The six actors accomplishing the trilogy - each glimpsed in two performances - furthermore dispense entire seminars worth of insight into modes a entertainer can conceive diverging characters.

Reasons to Be Pretty, reconsidered at the last preview on Thursday, starts with a nasty battle between Greg (Lee Trull) and Steph (Christina Vela). They've been a twosome for four years, but she has had it. The precipitating happening was an offhand comment that Greg has made, matching her examines to those of the warm newcomer at work.

Greg made the commentary to his Neanderthal ally Kent (Regan Adair). Kent's wife, Carly (Abbey Siegworth), currently hostile to Greg, recurring it to Steph. The irony, though, is that Kent's the one who actually is susceptible to the newcomer's attractions. Greg is just thoughtless. Kent is scum.

A distinct controller has arranged each of the three plays. Here Joel Ferrell has taken a more clear-cut set about in evaluation to his colleagues' more self-consciously stylish takes on the other two scripts.

In Reasons to Be Pretty, the player producing the large-scale interior excursion is Trull. Ferrell has conveyed out Trull's best in preceding collaborations, and he does so again. The feature Greg's self-understanding is less laden, and less convoluted, ...