Hey, Nice Face
Neil LaBute writes a lot about cruelty. His 1992 play In the Company of Men showed two businessmen conspiring to break the heart of a deaf female coworker, 2001’s The Shape of Things depicted a shy young man completely redesigned by a new girlfriend as an experiment, and his 2004 play Fat Pig has a budding romance nipped in the bud because a guy’s friends keep giving him a hard time about how overweight his new girlfriend is. His work often leaves him open to charges of misanthropy. I first saw the 1997 film of Company of Men on a video double bill with I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was by far the kinder movie of the two.
