"Sampson makes a contemporary fable about the black female body and its discontents. She also makes, in the Playwrights Horizons production that opened on Sunday under the exuberant direction of Leah C. Gardiner, an auspicious professional playwriting debut...Sampson uses a refreshing palette of theatrical colors to fill in the story...Though the inventiveness does not always pay off Gardiner’s well-acted and swift-moving production usually picks up the slack."
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"Sampson’s script plays like it’s sledding on a steep hill: You can feel the speed, the writer’s whizzing wit, the swift adjustments in tone and direction. The mixture of folklore-speak and hilarious up-to-the-minute banter is intoxicating...Gardiner’s vivid production is notable for its balance and propulsion. The cast is excellent...The combined effect of the music, the production and Sampson’s play: It's the feeling of being barraged by talent, all of it at full flood."
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"There’s a disturbing, powerful play hiding inside Tori Sampson’s 'If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka,' but it hasn’t worked its way out yet...It could all make for a great, and very scary, play. 'If Pretty Hurts' isn’t quite that play, though it feels like an energetic sketch in that direction...'If Pretty Hurts' needs to actually hurt, but what we’ve been shown has more often felt whimsical than ferocious...It’s got teeth inside it, but it isn’t biting yet."
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"A lovable but chaotic piece of theater, one that's simultaneously energizing and vivacious, and also too loose to be fully successful...The story is somewhat predictable, but there's nothing obvious about Simpson's storytelling style. Her voice is really cool and imaginative, creating a play that pulsates with contemporary vernacular and old-school theatricality...I wish the piece were just a little tighter so it could fully deliver on its ambitious style of storytelling."
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“Despite definite signs of talent ‘If Pretty Hurts’ has several problems, not least of which is the playwright's try-anything approach, which results in a jumbled narrative. But what makes it something of a trial is its insistence on lecturing the audience at great length...It's not surprising that the director, Leah C. Gardiner, has difficulty imposing some kind of order on these proceedings, but cast often charms, even with in the thinnest of roles."
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"There's more high-flown poetry than vulgarism in her writing, along with an odd fusion of storytelling techniques...Do such disparate elements coalesce? Well, no...The storytelling's now-naturalistic, now-metaphorical, now-monologue, now-dialogue, now-pantomime, now-dance; and Sampson's principal concern, the unfairness of beauty standards, is stomped into the ground...There are some good scenes...But all that damn meta keeps getting in the way."
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"The play is Sampson’s vibrant 90-minute spin on the time-honored 'black is beautiful' maxim...Bringing 'If Pretty Hurts' to its vibrant life is proficiently handled by director Leah C. Gardiner. She sees that all the actors maximize the possibilities in a story playwright Sampson cleverly tells by placing it in Affreakah-Amirrorikah, a land, not unlike America, where racism can, in the worst circumstances, turn in on itself...See Sampson's moving, pressing fable for, well, for its beauty."
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"Sampson has fused pop culture interactions with the magic realism of an Alvin Ailey-like choreographed folk tale to culminate her super beautiful main character's story...A Class A production. It's helmed by Gardiner, a director known to bring sprightliness and energy to a playwright's style, content, and characters...Though this play lacks the hoped for bite, it's never boring...The whole production is enhanced by the sumptuous music...The show should have lost at least ten or fifteen minutes."
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