Neil LaBute's Reasons to be Happy: 'My new play is revisiting old themes'

LaBute has broken one of his golden rules and revisited the characters of his 2008 work Reasons to be Pretty

Lauren O’Neil and Tom Burke in rehearsals for ‘Reasons to be Happy’ (Manuel Harlan)

You can't go home again.

Somebody said that – certainly once or twice before Thomas Wolfe made it famous – and while it's obviously not true in the literal sense, it certainly should be a rule to live by (unless you left something at home that's really important in which case I'd suggest hurrying there, getting it without talking to anyone and then leaving again very quickly, preferably by the back door). Life goes on, and so it should, and we all learn the hard way that we outgrow our childhood bedrooms and our school halls and even our families themselves. It's wonderful to look back on our collective pasts, sometimes with fondness and sometimes with regret, but to live in that place is the equivalent of being stuck and it's healthy to keep moving forward and trying new things. That's not to say forget about mum and dad and sis and Uncle __ __ (fill in the blank) but all of us, especially those who make a living by turning the page and exploring new worlds each night on the stage, need to keep moving toward the horizon and pushing ourselves to conquer the next audition, the next role or the next production. Theatre doesn't allow us to rest on our laurels for long; the life of a play is short (unless you're Andrew Lloyd Webber) and suddenly the curtain comes down for a final time and we have nothing but a programme and some photos to show our friends and family who didn't make it out to see the play and we're out of a job. By its very nature, there is a magical quality to a play on stage – now you see it, now you don't.

As a writer, I am someone who keeps trying to create new characters in new stories and pushing myself to surprise my audience with something that feels both new and familiar. I'm not complaining – I love my work. I'm at my best sitting in a darkened auditorium, working with actors and technicians to create an evening of theatrical entertainment. In life I can be indecisive or distant or cowardly or secretive or just plain human. I come to life in the artificial surroundings of the playhouse. I don't know why that is – I only know and believe it to be true. This isn't always the case, of course, nothing is always true, but often enough to call it a "truth." Ironically, I am getting better at living as I get closer to dying but that's enough of that. Who wants to be so damn honest at a time like this? The publication of a new play is always a time of celebration for me; the chance to leave a record of my very ephemeral life in the theatre behind is a pleasure indeed.

And after all of that preamble, the truth is I'm doing the very thing I warn the reader against: going home again. As an author I have now gone back to check in on a group of characters whom I wanted to see again and find out what has happened to them in the past few years. I've always admired television writers who get the opportunity to revisit the fictional lives of their characters week after week, year after year, and so I decided to do the same but on the stage. It's certainly been done before but it's a first for me and it was a pleasure to do so. I thought for some time about what group of characters I might want to spend some time with again – the characters in Fat Pig came close and I was certainly curious to see where the people in The Shape of Things might be a decade later – but in the end I wanted to head back to Reasons to be Pretty and the small Midwestern town that Greg and Steph and Carly and Kent called home. It's in the middle of nowhere (or what some folks might call "anywhere, USA") and it's a place that I don't want to live but I also feel like I've spent half of my life there. It could be a college town or the kind of rural industrial landscape of my youth or one of those suburban backwaters that exist from Florida to Maine and from the tip of California to the border towns of Washington state (and virtually any spot in between).

Drama king: Playwright Neil LaBute (Rex Features)

These days, to be a person struggling to get by at work and in love is to say you're an "American". People live from paycheck to paycheck, they work late and at several jobs just trying to make ends meet and everybody has a dream, whether it's getting through trade school or running their own company or falling in love or taking one more breath. Life is hard and I get to write about that – little tragedies and victories that play out in an hour and a half – and I feel lucky when anybody says to me that what they've just seen rings even partially true.

Nothing we do on stage matters as much as life – nothing I write means as much as somebody else's birth or first communion or marriage or retirement or death – but if writers and actors and audience can band together and play out a few stories that feel honestly created and genuinely inhabited then maybe we can find some kind of solace together for a few hours, reminding ourselves that we are all in this together and that maybe, just maybe, a false version of the truth can lead us toward how and why we should go about living the real thing. I might be full of s**t, but it was meant to be inspirational s**t and even now it doesn't sound completely crazy to me.

So this is the next chapter in the lives of four people whom I hope you'll recognise as yourselves and your friends and neighbours. I like these guys and I've tried to give them all an opportunity to be happy and to do better and to get ahead. Some of them do good things and one or two of them even feel like they've got a real chance at writing themselves a new ending to their seemingly pre-ordained lives. I like Greg and his bumbling attempts to be a nice guy. He makes nearly as many mistakes as I do in life and so I appreciate the way he keeps picking himself up off the ground, only to f**k up again. Steph is one tough chick and yet her heart is huge and I love the passion with which she lives her life, always going for broke. I had no idea where Kent would take me this time around but he surprised me a lot along the way – he just might make it as a man — and Carly is the kind of person I wish I was a little bit more like: centred and caring and disarmingly honest about herself and others.

Billie Piper and Tom Burke in ‘Reasons to Be Pretty’ in 2011 (Keith Pattison)

I don't know if I've got another story for these four people inside me; we get caught up in trilogies and franchise pictures in American entertainment and I only want to keep writing these plays if I actually have something worthwhile to say. I might drop in on these folks again one day but if I don't, I'm happy where they end up this time around. It was good to see them again and I thank them for reminding me that no matter how sh**ty life can be, it's so much better than the alternative.

And best of all, I remembered an important aspect of living by writing Reasons to be Happy: enjoy the journey and don't forget to look up from time to time – the scenery is beautiful and your fellow travellers are pretty f**king interesting.

'Reasons to be Happy', by Neil LaBute, Hampstead Theatre, London, to 16 April (hampsteadtheatre.com)

© 2013 Neil LaBute. This preface first appeared in the US edition of 'Reasons to be Happy', published by The Overlook Press