Overlook Has “Reasons to be Happy” — Rave Reviews for Neil LaBute's New Play!

Neil LaBute’s Reasons to be Happy, the companion piece to his critically acclaimed, 2009-Tony nominated reasons to be pretty, which Overlook published earlier this month, premiered this week to rave reviews at New York’s Lucille Lortel Theatre. Ben Brantley of The New York Times hailed it as “what may be the most winning romantic comedy of the summer” and Variety praised LaBute’s “astonishing command of the sharp side of the mother tongue.” Directed by LaBute and starring Jenna Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Leslie Bibb, and Fred Weller, Reasons to be Happy runs in New York through June 29th. 

“Same Couples, Reshuffled by a Mellowing Playwright”

Ben Brantley, The New York Times

You don’t always know how much you’ve missed certain people until they show up in your life again. When Steph started bawling out Greg the other night, and rushing him as if he were a tackling dummy, I felt an oddly comforting warmth. “Oh, you two,” I said to myself, grinning. “You haven’t grown up at all.”

The last time I saw this combustible couple was four years ago on Broadway, where they were the main characters in Neil LaBute’s “reasons to be pretty.” A prickly but compassionate comedy, it marked a turning point in the career of Mr. LaBute, a dramatist and filmmaker best known for savage portraits of selfish men, and it was nominated for a Tony for best play.

That show began with Steph (Marin Ireland) delivering a very loud, very obscene stream of invective at Greg (Thomas Sadoski). That’s how Mr. LaBute’s latest work, which opened on Tuesday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater in an MCC Theater production, starts off, too, though Steph and Greg are now portrayed by Jenna Fischer (of “The Office”) and Josh Hamilton.

The new play is called “Reasons to Be Happy.” And it would seem that in addition to coming to terms with capital letters, Mr. LaBute is more relaxed as a playwright than he’s ever been. He is clearly having a good time revisiting old friends. And, with Mr. LaBute directing a dynamite cast rounded out by Fred Weller and Leslie Bibb, you’re likely to feel the same way.

Yep, a man best known as a snarling misanthrope has come up with what may be the most winning romantic comedy of the summer, replete with love talk, LaBute-style, which isn’t so far from hate talk. One sweet and angry example: “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since you smashed my ice cream sandwiches into the pavement.”

Successful sequels by major dramatists are rarities. (I’m talking modern plays here; let’s not go near Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks, please.) Mostly, writers apparently feel that when their plays are over, the characters within them have had their say.

That Mr. LaBute chose to take up again with Greg and Steph, and their friends Kent and Carly (played here by Mr. Weller and Ms. Bibb), seems perfectly natural when you think about it, though. In other works — from the early “Bash: Latter Day Plays” to the more recent “Break of Noon” — Mr. LaBute has been a hit-and-run author, scoring points off morally dubious characters before finally blowing them into smithereens with a nasty surprise clincher.

In contrast, “reasons to be pretty” was about eternally unfinished business. It suggested that though couples may break up, and friends stop speaking, those relationships never really cease. Don’t you have someone who’s been out of your life for a long time with whom you still conduct conversations in your head?

You can bet that’s been true for Greg and Steph (who ended a four-year relationship at the beginning of “reasons to be pretty”), and for Kent and Carly (who were destined to split by the end of the same play). And Mr. LaBute, who it seems can be a loving as well as vengeful god to his fictional creations, has offered them the chance to talk in person once more.

I am happy to report that they are as articulately inarticulate, and as enlighteningly in the dark as ever. So don’t expect any kind of closure when this play ends, either.

Then, as now, these characters are still coming of age. In the case of Greg, who must be well into his 30s by now, it’s hard to distinguish that from an early-onset midlife crisis. As Steph comments, his idea of clarity is “pretty much like the consistency of mud.” And as written by Mr. LaBute, and portrayed with wonderfully cloudy spontaneity by Mr. Hamilton, Greg turns every decision into a murky maze of vacillation. He can’t even make it to the end of a sentence before turning a corner into another point of view.

It’s a pretty daunting vista he faces. Though Steph is now married to another man, she tracks down Greg when she hears he is dating the gorgeous Carly, a single mom and security guard, who is now divorced from Kent, who was Greg’s best friend before he blew the whistle on Kent’s extramarital pursuits. As Kent says to Greg (about Greg’s dating Carly), “That’s like practically incest, dude.”

That’s what Steph thinks, too. She also thinks maybe she and Greg should get back together. Still, Greg and Carly are making a real go of it, even though Kent would love to have Carly back, despite his new relationship with a never-seen knockout named Crystal.

Everyone is struggling to see straight through all the soap opera bubbles. Even the quick-tempered Kent says he’s been “doing a lot of work on me as a person.” Don’t be too quick to laugh at Kent. He has some pretty damning insights into Greg, the self-taught intellectual of the bunch, who reads books and uses big words.

Working with a design team that includes Neil Patel (sets) and Robert Kaplowitz (sound), Mr. LaBute finds a mortal urgency within this romantic pretzel. Buzzers and ringtones keep going off, subliminal reminders of life’s built-in deadlines, which loom ever closer for these no-longer-young people.

Every cast member shapes a thoroughly individual portrait of ambivalence, from Ms. Bibb’s glowing openness to Ms. Fischer’s hair-trigger combativeness (quite a contrast to her more passive Pam on “The Office”). The chemistry is so organic that you understand why their characters need to be together and as far away from one another as possible.

Is another reunion in their future? If the filmmaker Richard Linklater can keep resurrecting the on-and-off-again lovers played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in his “Before...” series of movies, Mr. LaBute should surely be allowed to bring these contentious friends and lovers back again and again. I’m looking forward to “Reasons to Be Retiring,” though I seriously doubt that a geriatric Greg will have figured himself out by then.

Reasons to Be Happy

Written and directed by Neil LaBute; sets by Neil Patel; costumes by Sarah J. Holden; lighting by Ben Stanton; sound by Robert Kaplowitz; production stage manager, Joel Rosen; production manager, B. D. White; general manager, Pamela Adams. Presented by MCC Theater, Robert LuPone, Bernard Telsey and William Cantler, artistic directors; Blake West, executive director. At the Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, West Village, (212) 352-3101, mcctheater.org. Through June 29. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.


WITH: Leslie Bibb (Carly), Jenna Fischer (Steph), Josh Hamilton (Greg) and Fred Weller (Kent).

MA GASTRONOMIE in the New York Times Magazine

In this week's New York Times Magazine, Mark Bittman and Thomas Keller tackle classic French cuisine, attempting several recipes out of master chef and La Pyramide founder Fernand Point's seminal cookbook Ma Gastronomie.

"Fernand Point was not one of your gym-going, globe-trotting, Ph.D.-equipped chefs. He was a roast-chicken-for-breakfast-eating, two-bottles-of-Champagne-at-lunch-drinking, big fat (no way around it) guy, the stereotype of the mid-20th-century French chef and almost without question the most influential of his time. 

His time was on either side of World War II, and his place was La Pyramide, about a half-hour south of Lyons, often considered the mecca of French cuisine. During the war itself, he fed refugees from the north and then closed for six months rather than feed the occupying forces. His lifestyle was legendary, as was his cooking. (His wine cellars, too — though they were overseen by Mme. Mado Point. They had their share of great Burgundies and Bordeaux but also brought respectability to Rhone wines, even the still-overlooked whites. Mme. Point also ran the restaurant after her husband’s death in 1955, by most reports brilliantly.) Everyone ate at La Pyramide, or wanted to. Half the great French chefs of the next generation — men like Bocuse, Chapel, Outhier and Vergé — trained under him. 

Point did not leave much in the way of records; little more than menus (done daily of course) and a few notes. His philosophy was to start with the provisions that arrived in the morning and cook from there, but his skill and experience were so great that the results were evidently incomparable, and a real advance from the heavy, preplanned, sauce-based cooking of his predecessors Escoffier and Carême.

He also left behind more than a few aphorisms, which covered more than food. There are gems: “Each morning the cuisinier must start again at zero, with nothing on the stove”; “Success is the sum of a lot of small things correctly done”; and the famous “Butter! Give me butter! Always butter!”

After he died, his notes and some ephemera were gathered into a book and published as “Ma Gastronomie.” I first heard of it in 1980 or so, when the Connecticut chef Steve Wilkinson introduced me to Point’s marjolaine, the greatest dessert ever. (Layers of nut-laced meringue, ganache, vanilla butter cream and praline butter cream. Yes, it’s in the book, and yes, you can make it, but it may take some practice, as well as a more detailed cookbook.)

I bought the book and learned from it, but I didn’t attach myself to it the way that a new generation of chefs did. (Many of whom trained with Bocuse, Chapel, etc.) Among those was Thomas Keller, who famously runs Per Se in New York and the French Laundry in California, and who wrote the introduction to the current edition. 

I’ve known Keller for 20-odd years, but we’ve never cooked together, and this new edition seemed like the right excuse. We settled on about 10 dishes, 3 of which are printed here. Point’s “recipes” might more rightly be called inspirations, and although many don’t present much of a problem for the experienced home cook, when grazing through the book I found that a third of them contain truffles, crayfish, foie gras or some combination thereof.

We weren’t going there. We wanted to explore Point’s style and sensibility, not his ability to use the priciest ingredients available. We focused on fish and shellfish dishes, an amazing soufflé “stuffed” with a poached egg and a supersimple steak with mustard-herb butter.

In the hands of a chef of Keller’s stature, the recipes came to life — as I’m sure Point would have appreciated — and Keller was able to stay close to the spirit of each. (The book gives you little choice other than improvising; few recipes are direct.) I was most impressed with Point’s fried-egg “recipe”: warm butter, don’t let it sizzle, slip in the egg, keep the heat low, wait until the white is creamy and the yolk hot. It’s perfect, foolproof, easy, yet not intuitive. The chef himself would undoubtedly have cooked and eaten a dozen at a time."

Did you miss Peter Mayer on Leonard Lopate (WNYC)?

In case you were stuck working at 1:30 this afternoon and missed the great discussion between Lynn Nesbit, Carlo Rotella and Overlook publisher Peter Mayer about TRUE GRIT and Charles Portis, WNYC has helpfully put the interview online!

Listen below or go here to listen to the talk and read a bit of background.

Norman Foster's Masdar development featured in the New York Times

Have you picked up a copy of Deyan Sudjic's new biography of architect Norman Foster? If not, this article from Sunday's New York Times should definitely pique your interest in the book. While NORMAN FOSTER: A LIFE IN ARCHITECTURE is primarily a professional biography, it also discusses Foster's idealism, design aesthetic and the Masdar development that received so much attention from the Times. Go here to read the full article, and check out a brief excerpt below!

Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.

Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.

Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.

Norman Foster, the firm’s principal partner, has blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices into an intriguing model for a sustainable community, in a country whose oil money allows it to build almost anything, even as pressure grows to prepare for the day the wells run dry. And he has worked in an alluring social vision, in which local tradition and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict — a vision that, at first glance, seems to brim with hope.

Continued here.

A wonderful reception for Susan Hill's SHADOWS IN THE STREET

Susan Hill's latest Simon Serralier mystery, SHADOWS IN THE STREET, went on sale in the U.S. last Thursday, and we're thrilled to see that others are loving her wonderful work as much as we are. Did you miss her review in the New York Times? See below for the full review and some other praise that has been rolling in for SHADOWS IN THE STREET.

"As every Trollope reader knows, English cathedral towns can be hotbeds of viciousness and vice. And so it is in Lafferton, where Susan Hill sets her thoughtful mysteries. As if it weren’t bad enough that flesh traffickers from Eastern Europe have been deploying a small army of underage prostitutes on the edge of town in THE SHADOWS IN THE STREET (Overlook, $24.95), the unpopular new dean of the cathedral, a “happy-clappy” Anglican evangelical, and his overbearing wife (“the Mrs. Proudie of St. Michael’s”) are hell-bent on saving the souls of these “Magdalenes,” whether they like it or not. Simon Serrailler, the brooding detective hero, doesn’t appear on the scene until a serial killer begins picking off some of the local working girls who’ve been displaced by the foreign competition. But his absence allows Hill to direct her elegant prose to other characters, especially Serrailler’s widowed sister, observed in depth as she struggles to live with her grief." -- The New York Times

“This is the fifth of Hill's exceptional series (after The Various Haunts of Men, The Pure in Heart, The Risk of Darkness, and The Vows of Silence). Her characters continue to be intelligent and engaging, and the perfect balance of drama, atmosphere, and suspense holds the reader to the very last page. Highly recommended for fans of thoughtful British mysteries, especially those written by P.D. James, Martha Grimes, and Tana French.” -- Library Journal (starred review)

“It is really the characters that are so strong in these novels and even the minor characters are brought to life... As usual, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.” -- Canadian Bookworm Blog

“Hill continues to engage us with fresh characters and intriguing story lines.” -- MostlyFiction.com

"Right from its rain drenched opening lines, Shadows draws the reader into its bleak landscape. Hill is a master at creating atmosphere – the autumn chill hovering over the town seeps right into the story, and tightens its hold on the reader as the plot hurtles towards its climax… strong writing, taut pace and finely etched characters” -- BookPleasures.com

80 Years Ago Today ... Judge Crater Never Returned

Last night, New York City raised a glass to Peter Quinn, author of the new book The Man Who Never Returned, a historical thriller based on the real-life story of Judge Joseph F. Crater.

If you're interested in the Judge Crater story (and, of course, the book!) check out this New York Times piece, where Quinn traces Judge Crater's last known steps with NYT reporter Alan Feuer.

The city is, itself, a sort of vanishing act — all those Broadway haunts replaced by condominiums — and Judge Crater can, perhaps, be thought of as its human embodiment: influential one day, annihilated the next. His memory lives on, but no more than his memory. Where did he go? Change the “he” to “it” and the question holds true for the Hotel Astor, the old Pennsylvania Station, the Automat.

Throw in some timeless specifics — sex, politics, the suggestion of corruption — and the Crater case could, without much effort, be discerned in the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper. Even its milieu — the anxious post-crash days when the severity of the Great Depression had not yet settled in — has relevance today. “When that guy disappeared, a lot went with him,” Mr. Quinn said. “It was the end of the whole 1920s era in New York.”

Today--on the anniversary of the judge's disappearance--the New York Daily News ran this op-ed by Quinn, reliving the story and the effect the Crater case had on the New York City culture.

The Crater case is one of eternal intrigue. It speaks to what New York will always be: seductive, exciting, filled with endless possibilities for getting rich and getting killed, a dynamic creator and consummate destroyer of celebrity.

Barnes and Noble is also featuring The Man Who Never Returned on their site. Click here for the full review.

Quinn's jaded cops quote Ecclesiastes and Poe, Dante and Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas's aesthetic of clarity is especially salubrious in Dunne's line of work—and true to the hardboiled genre, it arrives almost too late. But in the end it's not Aquinas but an older saint, Ambrose, who holds the key to the Crater mystery—and that's as close to a spoiler as this review will come. The presence of such ancient shades in The Man Who Never Returned seems fanciful, but they're a reminder that the diversions and demons Quinn's characters pursue are ancient ones, not limited to one era or generation. In the end, the mystery is unraveled—but history claims its prerogative, swallowing up the answers. Joseph Force Crater—his name like the open hole in which Fintan Dunne and his generation first saw death—remains missing to this day.

And you can check out the video from Quinn's previously-mentioned New York 1 interview. Unfortunately, we can't embed the video, but it really brings the story to life.

Enjoy a few pictures from Quinn's party last night. More to come!

TRUE GRIT on New York Times' Papercuts

Great notice today of Overlook's triumphant reissue of Charles Portis' True Grit, with a foreward by Ms. Donna Tartt on Papercuts, Dwight Garner's New York Times Book Blog:

Last week, when I posted some samples of Eliot Fremont-Smith’s memorable reviews from the mid-1960s, there was one I forgot – his piece on Charles Portis’s 1968 masterpiece “True Grit.”

Fremont-Smith effortlessly nailed the book’s breathless comic tone:

True Grit is when you are a 14-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, and you’ve just shot a dangerous outlaw and the gun’s recoil has sent you backward into a pit, and you are wedged in the pit and sinking fast into the cave below where bats are brushing against your legs, and you reach out for something to hold on to and find a rotting corpse beside you and it’s full of angry rattlers, and then it turns out you didn’t kill the outlaw, he’s up at the rim of the pit laughing at you, about to shoot you – and you don’t lose your nerve. That’s True Grit.

Church Signs Across America in the New York Times Book Review this Sunday 4/8 (Easter!)

Tomorrow's Book Review today: great notice of Pam and Steve Paulsen's CHURCH SIGNS ACROSS AMERICA. {Click to enlarge}

LOOKING FOR JIMMY in the NEW YORK TIMES & THE WASHINGTON POST

Excellent reviews in yesterday’s New York Times and Washington Post for Peter Quinn's Looking for Jimmy:

“Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America” (Overlook, $26.95), a collection of charming essays by Peter Quinn, a former speechwriter for Governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, serves as a timely reminder that controversy over immigration exists very much as part of a continuum.

"This exceptionally thoughtful and interesting inquiry into Irish America, Peter Quinn writes, "is tentative, subjective and personal." Though it reaches certain broad judgments and conclusions about the Irish American experience, and though it draws heavily on the work of others who have written about that endlessly interesting subject, its primary source is Quinn and his family..."

HOW LANGUAGE WORKS in THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

Two great notices for David Crystal's How Language Works: Paul Dickson in The New York Times writes: "He succeeds again and again with clarity, wit and enthusiasm." And Union-Tribune Book Editor Arthur Salm offers that How Language Works "is pretty much the reference book we all need in order to extract the most calories out of all the other language books we'll no doubt continue to consume."