Review: ONLY UGLY GUYS at Running Errands MN

Only Ugly Guys, from Running Errands, is not interested in subtle critiques or soft landings. It hits fast and hard, slipping between confession and performance, letting its four characters spiral through love, control, projection, and the quiet violence of digital romance without ever giving the audience a place to rest. Written by Kurt Engh and directed by Grant Sorenson, the piece moves like a thread pulled tight — four stories, four voices, none of them fully trustworthy, all of them feeling dangerously close to someone you know (or worse, to yourself).

You’re not watching from a safe distance; you’re being pulled in, made complicit, listening to men talk about connection in a language that’s equal parts algorithm and desperation. There’s something unnerving about how casual the darkness is here — love bombing, ghosting, manipulation — not presented as extremes, but as everyday tools people use to keep from being seen too clearly.

Brad, Ciprian, Adam, Dean — played by Steve Mallers, Jack Oleg, Trent Ramert, and Leo Rossmiller — are not archetypes, they’re messier than that, each one circling around the same question in their own broken way: when everything is accessible, when attention is cheap, what does affection even mean anymore?

The production leans into the tension without trying to resolve it. Screens flicker with messages, lights glitch, sound spills out like interference — a reminder that intimacy now often arrives through a feed, a screen, a performance of vulnerability. The design (video/audio by Ian Olson, set/lighting by Shannon Elliott) doesn’t just support the piece, it shapes it, wrapping the characters in the same fractured digital noise we all move through.

The writing is sharp, often funny, often sad, and it resists resolution. There’s no redemption here, no clear arc, no catharsis. And that’s what makes it hit. It doesn’t try to moralize or fix anything — it just holds up a mirror and lets the silence stretch.

You leave the theater and maybe you don’t talk right away. Maybe you go home and scroll your texts, or revisit that one message you never replied to, or think about the last time you said too much and the next time you said nothing. Only Ugly Guys doesn’t tell you what to do with any of that. It just reminds you that it’s real.

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