Ms. Sampson uses a refreshing palette of theatrical colors to fill in the story. Mixing high school comedy and magic realism, American pop and African djembe drums, she suggests a world filled with piquant specifics yet one that remains, in essence, universal in place and time. The conflicts among adolescents, like those between parents and children, have never not been a story.
And though the inventiveness does not always pay off — the play’s Chorus is a cellphone represented in whimsical human form by Rotimi Agbabiaka — Ms. Gardiner’s well-acted and swift-moving production usually picks up the slack. On a spare, circular stage bordered by prismatic plasticwalls (the set design is by Louisa Thompson), she speeds the cast from scene to scene, providing only as much visual information as necessary.
Still, with the help of Dede Ayite’s terrific costumes, we are never confused or disoriented; when Akim’s escape from her family brings her (and the others) to a fateful river, Ms. Gardiner works wonders with just scarves and bodies and the simplest of stage tricks.
Those bodies are choreographed, in that scene and in two thrilling musical sequences, by Raja Feather Kelly, bringing lift to the narrative without dispersing it. One of the numbers, a gospel-inflected barnburner in fact called “Lifted,” with lyrics by Ms. Sampson and music by Ian Scot, would be reason enough to see the show. Its beguiling refrain, led by Carla R. Stewart as the stunning Voice of the River, is: “I’m reaching for my beautiful.”
So is the play, which ends with a powerful coda that grounds its unfailing pep and familiar satire in old-fashioned (and exceptionally executed) naturalism. What was occasionally manic and overbright in the previous 100 minutes is toned so far down in the final 10 as to suggest, without words, a much subtler moral lesson.
Not that moralizing is Ms. Sampson’s point. Though she has talked about her play as being influenced by Brecht, she isn’t, on the evidence, referring to his principle of alienation, in which deliberate distancing effects prevent the audience from indulging in sentiment at the expense of instruction.
Quite the opposite: “If Pretty Hurts” is successful exactly to the extent it engages us emotionally in the moral quandary of beauty, no matter what Amirrorikah we’re looking in.
