Shit. Meet. Fan. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
At some point in Robert O’Hara’s new play Shit. Meet. Fan. the audience is so riled up, laughing and gasping at every reveal, it feels like the heyday of the Jerry Springer show. O’Hara wants to set a trap to unconsciously lure the audience into a pleasurable wallowing in other people’s shit but then turn the spotlight back on the audience.
He says the play is “a blistering vulgar satire on Male Toxicity and White Privilege.” Those intentions are clear but he does not successfully skewer his subjects. Maybe there is a light roasting but the satire mostly misses the mark.
Set in a minimalist, brutalist loft in DUMBO, plastic surgeon Rodger (Neil Patrick Harris) and therapist Eve (Jane Krakowski) are hosting a party to celebrate a lunar eclipse. In what appears to be a routine get together, Rodger’s friends, who he met in college at his fraternity, are coming over with their wives. Lawyer Brett (Garret Dillahunt) and stay-at-home mother Claire (Debra Messing) are long-married and long-fighting, with Claire drinking too much from the start. Newlyweds Hannah (Constance Wu) and Frank (Michael Oberholtzer) cannot keep their hands off each other. Single, divorced Logan (Tramell Tillman) shows up stag even though everyone was waiting to meet his latest date.
O’Hara is interested in white privilege and racial issues burbling beneath the surface. The couples do not clock the microaggressions. Logan, who is Black, is not let up automatically by the doorman even though Eve called down to instruct the doorman to let all her friends up. And no one catches on as to why they breezed through but Logan didn’t.
Even if tempers are already a little high and drinks have been flowing, Eve proposes a game where they all put their phones face up on the coffee table and for the next hour, they have to answer the phone and read their texts aloud.
It may come as no surprise that literally everyone has something they want to hide on those phones. Some of it is the usual garden variety infidelity and then there are other crimes and betrayals. White lies told in relationships, omissions to erase certain assumptions about them, and efforts to re-write the past to move forward with a different future. The revelation of these secrets changes the dynamics in the room. Or at least it should.
The production, which is also directed by O’Hara, does not reach that fever-pitch level of operatic farce he’s going for. It’s a pile-up of extremes but each time it dully and repeatedly lands in the same way. Every moment in the play is set-up for conflict and each line is delivered with the same thrusting stab.
Frankly, a non-stop contempt-a-thon is kind of boring. Except for a few genuine moments (Garrett Dillahunt when there is one revelation and Neil Patrick Harris another when trying to be a supportive father to a teen), the actors do not inhabit these roles comfortably. It all comes across as quite put-upon.
There’s an unvarnished tone to the whole evening with the white characters unfiltered, coarse in their language, and unrepentant with their words. But something about the way the women are written here feels deeply inauthentic. There is no gendered code-switching which I would have expected a little of—there are things women will say to each other and among each other that I would not expect them to say in front of someone else’s husband. The women are written in the same vernacular as the men and that just feels off.
I fully accept the premise that these people do not care about who they hurt and with the words they use (using more than a soupçon of the word “fag” and “faggot” and the phrase “the joy luck club of pussy licking” against the one Asian woman in the room) but their voices are not believable. This flattening of the women is disappointing. White women can be uniquely terrible in their own way!
At some point it is just tedious to listen to these people argue with each other when we have zero investment in any of them. They hate each other and themselves so why are we doing this? It becomes exhausting white people noise for 90% of the play–which is intentional. BUT then there is a tectonic shift in the play which is meant to address this and it does not land.
There is confrontation about how these white people are living their lives oblivious to the damage they are inflicting. The character calling them out—why be coy—it’s Logan and he’s trying to reconcile his own time spent with them all these years. But the play hurries this along, it gets muddled into the toxic bro stuff, and it is ultimately left hanging. The recriminations get swallowed up by the machinations of the play.
Part of the issue may be that this play is based on the Italian film Perfect Strangers. So O’Hara is boxed in by the story he’s adapting—there’s a place the story has to get to. And the original material is not wrestling with what O’Hara is.
Perfect Strangers was remade in French as Nowhere to Hide. I could not access Perfect Strangers but Nowhere to Hide was streaming on Netflix. So I watched it out of curiosity to see exactly where the lines between the original (well the remake) and O’Hara’s work were. I was shocked to find how much more the film was about nuanced dynamics of relationships. Of course, you can say more in unspoken close-ups than on stage. But the movie moved with great subtlety.
O’Hara doesn’t seem all that interested in these characters’ relationships. They are simply the métier to present this thesis on white privilege and toxic masculinity—two topics I am very interested. But the delivery of the material makes it hard to hear the message he’s getting at.
Reading the play afterwards I think some powerful moments got totally lost on stage. O’Hara keeps throwing this high-pitched bitchy-toned chum into the water to stir up these non-stop shark fights. But the constant sharpness undercuts the real human nature at issue.