We all know, at least theoretically, not to judge books by their covers, and the same goes for a play’s set. Still, that first impression when you walk into a theater contains information. The event of the play has already begun, and whatever the space is giving you is a part of it. Thus my trepidation upon entering the capacious Newman Mills Theater at MCC for Robert O’Hara’s Shit. Meet. Fan. Clint Ramos’s set fits the minimalist-modern venue almost too well: It’s a luxury condo, sprawling decadently across the room, all glass and tasteful neutrals and massive, characterless abstract paintings. A huge backlit bar, a swanky kitchen not really intended for cooking, and an upper level with a balcony are all backed by a glittering view of Fidi through the windows (that’s that DUMBO money). Sure, your gut might be wrong, but what your gut has to say is: Nothing good can happen in a space like this.
And nothing does. Neither in terms of the story O’Hara’s telling nor of the play that’s telling it. Shit. Meet. Fan. is a thin, nasty affair, a smug exhibition of human selfishness, vapidity, and cruelty — especially, and unshockingly, the straight-white-male variety. (White women next, by a hair.) “This play is a blistering vulgar satire on Male Toxicity and White Privilege,” writes O’Hara in a script note labeled “Trigger Warning.” “Allow the laughter to indict the audience and lure them into a sense of comfort. Then let the Shit. Meet. Fan.” Vulgar it certainly is — if you don’t want to hear a bunch of aging bros throwing around slurs and crowing about banging triplets, maybe consider a different use of your evening. But blistering? The play’s aims are too obvious, its satire (though I have my doubts about that word, too) too flat and contemptuous to merit such an adjective. Then there’s that audience directive: “indict,” “lure” — does this kind of gotcha stuff ever really work? It takes me straight back to those moments in grade-school when I sat simmering in my tiny Velcro shoes as teachers lectured the whole class on something we all knew Peter had done. Meanwhile, Peter was the only one not listening. The kind of easy blanket derision and condemnation that Shit. Meet. Fan. deals in leaves a similar taste in the mouth. No toxic bro is walking out of that theater having his Scrooge moment, vowing to live his life in the past, the present, and the future. (He never bought a ticket in the first place.) Instead, the rest of us spend an hour and three quarters with a gaggle of mostly heinous people, wondering what it is we’re learning that we haven’t heard many times before — in forms both equally crude and infinitely more graceful.
The fact that lots of these people are big TV celebrities feels like a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too situation for O’Hara, who also directs the show. He can be sure that audiences will show up excited to see Jane Krakowski, Neil Patrick Harris, and Debra Messing (though, given my own TV tastes, I was actually more pumped about Tramell Tillman and Garret Dillahunt). If you clap or holler for any of those folks on their first appearances, you can factor that into the indictment that’s coming for you later on. Krakowski is the first to receive applause: As the show begins, lights pop up on her, wearing chic red shorts in the spotless kitchen and essentially playing her character from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt with the flourishes scaled down a bit. This is Eve, a wealthy therapist married to plastic surgeon Rodger (Neil Patrick Harris), currently freaking out about finding a box of Magnum condoms in her daughter’s purse. Mom and normal sassy teenager Sam (Genevieve Hannelius) spar for a bit before the teen goes out, then Eve and Rodger spar as they uncork wine and dump grapes and crackers from Whole Foods on plates in preparation for an eclipse-watching party. O’Hara’s text has a sitcom patter to it with transparent laugh lines that feel almost like Neil Simon with more atmospheric profanity. “You know, Rodger, you know half of everything and all of nothing,” says Eve. Later, she compares women to Macs and men to PCs — because a PCs is “cheap. Picks up viruses. And can only do one thing at a time.” Whereat Frank (Michael Oberholtzer), one of Rodger’s old frat buddies, shoots back that Macs are “expensive and compatible only with themselves.” (The tech metaphor, like the humor, is 1990s-dated.)
If this is the kind of stuff that’s supposed to be luring us in only for the rug of our moral culpability to be whipped out from under us, it’s pretty weak bait. The fact is that O’Hara is just warming up, and a feeling of lag settles in on the way to the incitement of his play’s actual premise. Which is: Eve is about to propose a game. “How many couples would split up immediately if they looked at each other’s phones?” she ponders coyly. The group has just been discussing an absent friend whose wife caught him cheating with a “22-year-old piece of ass” by looking at his phone. So some devious entertainment suggests itself. Everyone puts their phones on the coffee table. “Whatever texts, emails, calls from whatever apps, whatever arrives we share it,” declares Eve. “For the next hour. We share it. We don’t have any secrets for the next hour.”
I know what you must be thinking: These people all sound so lovely and healthy and forthright, what could possibly be the problem? Well, shockingly, there’s a fan, and there’s some shit headed toward it. Will Brett (Garret Dillahunt) and Claire’s (Debra Messing) marriage survive the discovery that Brett receives a nightly video message featuring the anatomy of someone named Monique? Will Hannah (Constance Wu), newly married to Frank, discover what’s already screamingly obvious from his narcissist-fuckboy behavior? What about Logan (Tramell Tillman), the only Black guy in Rodger’s group of friends, bound to this sordid crew through fraternity ties? What rancid, just barely hidden qualities in his buddies will this night bring to the surface?
Shit. Meet. Fan. is based on Paolo Genovese’s 2016 film, Perfect Strangers, an edgy Italian comedy that immediately inspired a Mexican remake, then a South Korean one. The premise appears to be irresistible, though I could resist it. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a U.S. remake in the works,” wrote my former colleague David Edelstein when the second film, Perfectos desconocidos, premiered in 2017. “It’s very entertaining,” he went on, “in a middlebrow Broadway comedy kind of way.” Is there such a thing as damning with faint prophecy? Now we’ve got a middlebrow not-quite-Broadway not-quite-comedy, and although O’Hara is clearly going for bite — partly as a result of running the idea that “everyone has secrets” through the Large Hadron Collider of American race and gender politics — Shit. Meet. Fan.’s ostentatious awfulness just comes off as incurious and hacky. Is it any surprise that the few shreds of humanity and solidarity in the play will almost always be displayed by Logan and Hannah, the two members of the group who aren’t white? Or that they’re the only ones able to walk out of the flaming wreckage with some dignity intact? What exactly is revelatory at this point about “Men Suck,” “White People Suck”? Honestly, I might still pause for “Rich People Suck,” but the play is more interested in identity than in economics. In the end, Shit. Meet. Fan. feels almost like some kind of bitter prank: Get a bunch of famous TV actors together and use them to tell the audience “Shame, shame, shame.” What a waste of theater’s tools; what a sour, narrow use to put them to.
Shit. Meet. Fan. is at MCC through December 15.
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