The Reason You Suck Speech / Theatre

"Reason You Suck" Speeches in theatre.

---

• Jeremy and Michael's climactic argument in Be More Chill during the school play is essentially this, Jeremy finally expressing how sick he is of Michael not caring what people think about him.
  JEREMY: This is so- Y-y-y-y-you love to feel superior and don't care about being popular!
  MICHAEL: Of course I care! I just know it's never gonna happen!
  JEREMY: What? You resent me because I wouldn't g-g-g-give up like you did?
  MICHAEL: I don't resent you, I'm jealous you try!
  JEREMY: Well, I'm j-j-jealous you don't!
• The Boys in the Band. Harold gives the Mother of All Reads to Michael.
  Harold: Now it's my turn, and ready or not, Michael, here goes: you're a sad and pathetic man. You're a homosexual and you don't want to be, but there's nothing you can do to change it. Not all the prayers to your God, not all the analysis you can buy, in all the years you've go left to live. You may one day be able to know a heterosexual life — if you want it desperately enough, if you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate. But you'll always be homosexual as well. Always Michael. Always. Until the day you die.
• In John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer, the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer delivers one of these to the terrorists, about how he and his wife generally try to be good people while the terrorists are, well, terrorists.
• Glengarry Glen Ross has two of these happen back-to-back.
  • Roma gave one to Williamson, after lying to Lingk about what happened to his check, thereby costing Roma one of his big sales. "Who told you you can work with men!?"
  • Immediately following Roma's rant, Shelly Levene tries to get his own licks in on Williamson. Having spent the entire movie as Williamson's Butt-Monkey, Levene eagerly takes the opportunity to take up where Roma left off and get a little payback. Unfortunately for Levene, he gets caught up in the moment and makes a slip about Lingk's check, which implicates him as the thief. This gives Williamson an opportunity to destroy Levene utterly.
• "Alas For You" in Godspell. The lyrics come from Matthew 23, from the speech known as the Seven Woes to the Scribes and Pharisees (see entry under Literature).
• Hamilton has a few of these scattered throughout, but none of them manage to be as self-destructing as Alexander's published rant at the only other member of his own party from "The Adams Administration". The one line Hamilton has on Broadway was a much longer rant called "An Open Letter", which was dropped just after opening night.
  Go ahead, you aspire to my level
  You inspire to malevolence
  Say hi to the Jeffersons!
  And the spies all around me
  Maybe they can confirm
  I don't care if I kill my career with this letter
  I'm confining you to one term
  Sit down, John, you fat motherfuckstick!
  • Doubling as a What the Hell, Hero? moment, Alexander's wife Eliza and sister-in-law Angelica separately give him one after the Reynolds Pamphlet is published (a pamphlet wherein he refuted a rumor that harmed his reputation by...outing himself as an adulterer). Special mention goes to Angelica's Cut Song "Congratulations":
  Angelica: Congratulations.
  You have invented a new kind of stupid
  A "damage you can never undo" kind of stupid
  An "open up the cages in the zoo" kind of stupid
  A "Truly, you didn't think this through?" kind of stupid
  Let's review: You took a rumor a few, maybe two, people knew
  And refuted it by sharing an affair of which no one has accused you!?
  I begged you to take a break, you refused to
  So scared of what your enemies will do to you
  But you're the only enemy you ever seem to lose to
  You know why Jefferson can do what he wants?
  He doesn't dignify schoolyard taunts with a response!
• Hamlet: Hamlet is the master of these.
  • Dishing it out to others: He gives one to Ophelia ("Get thee to a nunnery"), two to his mother ("You are the queen, your husband's brother's wife and would it were not so, you are my mother", "Shame, where is thy blush"), one to Laertes ("You'll mouth, I'll rant as well") and one to Claudius at the end while giving him a Rasputinian Death.
  Hamlet: Here thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, drink of this potion, is thy union here? Follow my mother. (King dies.)
  • To himself: Hamlet's overly critical nature also tells himself off for begin vain and not attending to finding proof of his uncle's guilt. Watch the "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" soliloquy (2.2).
• Henry IV: King Henry IV delivers an absolutely blistering, borderline I Have No Son! one of these to his son Hal on his deathbed after Hal believes him to be dead already and immediately grabs his crown. In an interesting subversion of the trope, Hal comes back with a The Reason I Don't Suck, Actually speech and convinces his father otherwise, and he dies with the two at peace.
  Thou hidest a thousand daggers in thy thoughts,
  Which thou hast whetted on thy stony heart,
  To stab at half an hour of my life.
  What! canst thou not forbear me half an hour?
  Then get thee gone and dig my grave thyself,
  And bid the merry bells ring to thine ear
  That thou art crowned, not that I am dead.
• Henrik Ibsen did it at least twice.
  • The Pretenders have the antagonist Bishop Nikolas of Oslo coming Back from the Dead, giving a jarring speech that doubles as a Take That, Audience! speech, actually saying "the reason you suck" to Norway! A neat triple trope, as The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You is also played straight.
  • In Brand, the main character does it towards his mother, and later to a couple of farmers because they have the audacity to ask him to become their priest.
  • The Wild Duck has Gregers, calling his father out. And Relling, calling Gregers out.
• Into the Woods The Witch's song Last Midnight is a scathing one, directed at the Baker, Cinderella, Jack and Little Red Riding Hood (and indirectly everyone else but herself).
• The opening of Jasper in Deadland cuts between several scenes of someone in Jasper's life lambasting him for a different shortcoming, with Jasper not even trying to refute them.
• Lizard Boy: As Trevor once again blames all his problems on his scales, Cary finally snaps and tries to tell him that blaming all his problems on one thing is just an excuse to not face his own internal issues.
• Done in Man of La Mancha by the Knight of the Mirrors (actually Carrasco in disguise), with attendants pushing mirrors into Don Quixote's face every way he turns:
  "Look! Don Quixote! Look in the mirror of reality and behold things as they truly are. Look! What seest thou, Don Quixote? A gallant knight? Naught but an aging fool! Look! Dost thou see him? A madman dressed for a masquerade! Look, Don Quixote! See him as he truly is! See the clown! Drown, Don Quixote. Drown—drown in the mirror. Go deep—the masquerade is ended! Confess! Thy lady is a trollop, and thy dream the nightmare of a disordered mind!"
• Janis in Mean Girls's reprise of Someone Gets Hurt is just this at Cady.
• The naked King by E. Schwartz is an adaptatiof of Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes. near the end, the Prime Minister, upon realising that the king really is naked in front of the whole people, finally speaks clearly to the King:
  You are naked, old fool. Do you understand it?! Butt-naked! Look at the people! look at them I said, you jester of a king! They started thinking! Do you understand what they are thinking, you idiot? Traditions crumble! Smoke rises over the ruins of the former state!
• Several of these appear in 1985's The Normal Heart (and subsequent 2014 film): Ned delivers one to his (straight) brother Ben for secretly believing him to be "sick" and for not supporting their cause and instead spending his money on a huge mansion, Dr. Emma Brookner rages at the government panel for rejecting her application for AIDS research funding, and Bruce delivers an absolutely devastating, though not unreasonable one to Ned for harming the activism group with his aggressive, bullying tactics, going so far as to say that he is exploiting AIDS victims' deaths.
• Christine delivers multiple lines that essentially add up to one of these to the titular character during the climax of The Phantom of the Opera, calling him her "fallen idol and false friend", telling him "it's in your soul that the true distortion lies".
• One of the female leads in Neil la Bute's Reasons to Be Pretty. Earlier, though the comment is never stated outright, it's implied that her boyfriend has said she was just "regular" in comparison to a female coworker who was "hot," and things quickly soured between them. She breaks up with her boyfriend and delivers one of these speeches to him in front of a crowded mall, commenting on how he stinks after work, his nostrils are unattractive, his penis is small, and they have unimaginative sex.
• In John Logan's Red, after two years of working for the caustic artist Mark Rothko, Ken finally snaps when Rothko says that Ken's "neediness" bores him:
  Bores you? Bores you?! Christ almighty, trying working for you for a living! — The talking-talking-talking-Jesus-Christ-won't-he-ever-shut-up titanic self absorption of the man! You stand there trying to look so deep when you're nothing but a solipsistic bully with your grandiose self-importance and your lectures and arias and let's-look-at-the-fucking-canvas-for-another-few-weeks-let's-not-fucking-paint-let's-just-look. And the pretension! Jesus Christ, the pretension! I can't imagine any other painter in the history of art ever tried so hard to be SIGNIFICANT! You know, not everything has to be so goddamn IMPORTANT all the time! Not every painting has to rip your guts out and expose your soul! Not everyone wants art that actually HURTS! Sometimes you just want a fucking still life or landscape or soup can or comic book! Which you might learn if you ever actually left your goddamn hermetically sealed submarine here with all the windows closed and no natural light — BECAUSE NATURAL LIGHT ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU! But then nothing is ever good enough for you! Not even the people who buy your pictures! Museums are nothing but mausoleums, galleries are run by pimps and swindlers, and art collectors are nothing but shallow social climbers. So who is good enough to own your art?! Anyone?! Or maybe the real question is: Who is good enough to even see your art?...Is it just possible no one is worthy enough to look at your paintings? ...That's it, isn't it? ... We have all been "weighed in the balance and been found wanting." You say you spend your life in search of real "human beings," people who can look at your pictures with compassion. But you no longer believe those people exist ... So you lose faith ... So you lose hope ... So black swallows red. My friend, I don't think you'd recognize a real human being if he were standing right in front of you.
• A good chunk of "Goodbye Love" from RENT is this between Roger and Mark.
• The second half of "See I'm Smiling" from "The Last Five Years" is Cathy's rant to Jamie about his egotism.
  You can't spend a single day
  That's not about you and you and nothing but you -
  Mahvelous novelist, you!
  Isn't he wonderful, just twenty-eight!
  The savior of writing!
  You and you and nothing but you -
  Miles and piles of you
  Pushing through windows and bursting through walls
  En Route to the sky!
• Stanley to Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. Also happens in the film adaption.
  Take a look at yourself here in a worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for 50 cents from some rag-picker. And with a crazy crown on. Now what kind of a queen do you think you are? Do you know that I've been on to you from the start, and not once did you pull the wool over this boy's eyes? You come in here and you sprinkle the place with powder and you spray perfume and you stick a paper lantern over the light bulb - and, lo and behold, the place has turned to Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile, sitting on your throne, swilling down my liquor. And do you know what I say? Ha ha! Do you hear me? Ha ha ha!

• Six: The Musical when Katherine Howard delivers a roasting to the other queens, unpicking errors in their claims before the start of All You Wanna Do.

• The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare ends with titular "shrew," Katharina, giving a very biting - and long — "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Bianca and the Widow:
  Katharina: Such duty as the subject owes the prince
  Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
  And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
  And not obedient to his honest will,
  What is she but a foul contending rebel
  And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
  I am ashamed that women are so simple
  To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
  Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway...
  • Values Dissonance may, of course, apply.
• Mr. Cladwell to Bobby in the Urinetown song Act 1 Finale
• Evita has Waltz for Evita and Che which is the two of them doing this to each other.
• Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband:
  Mrs. Cheveley: Will you shake hands?
  Lord Goring: With you? No. Your transaction with Robert Chiltern may pass as a loathsome commercial transaction of a loathsome commercial age; but you seem to have forgotten that you came here to- night to talk of love, you whose lips desecrated the word love, you to whom the thing is a book closely sealed, went this afternoon to the house of one of the most noble and gentle women in the world to degrade her husband in her eyes, to try and kill her love for him, to put poison in her heart, and bitterness in her life, to break her idol, and, it may be, spoil her soul. That I cannot forgive you. That was horrible. For that there can be no forgiveness.

---