The script to Robert O’Hara’s new play is prefaced with a trigger warning: “This play is a blistering vulgar satire on Male Toxicity and White Privilege.”
Blistering? Yeah. Vulgar? Certainly. And viciously entertaining. But when it comes to the show’s loftier ambitions — the “satire” part of “blistering vulgar satire” — its execution is edgy but not necessarily sharp.
“Shit. Meet. Fan.,” which opened Monday at MCC Theater and is based on the 2016 Italian film “Perfect Strangers,” opens in a chic Dumbo condo where Rodger (Neil Patrick Harris) and Eve (Jane Krakowski) live with their teenage daughter, Sam (Genevieve Hannelius). But for all the apartment’s swanky accouterments (including a home bar and spacious terrace, all courtesy of Clint Ramos’s Zillow-perfect set design), there’s no domestic bliss here, especially not between the married couple.
But for tonight Rodger and Eve are the hosts of a gladiatorial fight night disguised as a party of friends who’ve come to watch an eclipse. This coterie includes Claire (Debra Messing), a heavy drinker with some mother-in-law issues, and Brett (Garret Dillahunt), her tone-deaf lawyer husband; Frank (Michael Oberholtzer), the bro-iest of the bros, and his new wife, Hannah (Constance Wu, again playing the precious outsider); and Logan (a sharp Tramell Tillman), who shows up sans his new girlfriend. The men are brothers from frat days past, which means alcohol, cocaine, bawdy tales and shared secrets, often dividing the party among gender lines.
But the real trouble of the night begins when Eve suggests a game: for an hour everyone must share the texts, emails and calls they get on their phones. The reveals revolve around exes, affairs, hidden sexual preferences, plastic surgery appointments, timeshares in the Swiss Alps, even crimes. It soon becomes clear that, unsurprisingly, these friends are awful in a Whitman’s sampler assortment of ways. O’Hara, who wrote and directed the show, gleefully pokes at these characters’ insecurities, hypocrisies and resentments as a stream of Bravo TV-sized revelations steadily raises the stakes. The direction is brilliantly cued and paced, so the party’s movement (both the movement of the characters in relation to one another in the two-story space, and the flow of the dialogue in each scene) keeps the play going at a taut and lively momentum.
And it helps that this is no cast of slouches. The comedic chemistry of the group is palpable, and each actor brings their own delicious affect to their role. Harris shows off his impeccable comic timing with Rodger’s sardonic quips and Krakowski fully inhabits the snide mean girl. A hilariously clowny Messing goes full “Will & Grace” with Claire’s hyperbolic drunken reactions, and Dillahunt takes hearty bites of his character’s casual bigotry.
But all this drama has a saturation point. Why are these people playing this game? Why are they even friends to begin with? For all of its juicy spectacle, the ever-escalating messiness makes the play increasingly more implausible, which is fine for when it’s just playing for laughs and shock value, but not when it sets its brow for serious commentary.
Some of that commentary is about how we’re increasingly disconnected from ourselves and others in our modern age of technology. But that message feels a bit pat, as though even the play itself isn’t too convinced.
Either way the tech angle is secondary to how those of marginalized racial and sexual identities can come under attack by those who are blessed with white privilege. So as the only nonwhites at the party Hannah and Logan are the odd ones out. They’re served their own special brand of microaggressions from the people they call friends, and by the end of the play they’re demoted to mouthpieces for the show’s clunky indictments of prejudice and privilege. Similarly, the play struggles to fully parse the ways that even Logan, the sole Black man in a very white brotherhood, can be the target of his friends’ racial biases and still be complicit in their toxic masculinity, even when he’s victimized by it.
Like the film it’s based on, “Shit. Meet. Fan.” offers an ending that suggests some or all of what we’ve seen on this night of an eclipse may not be exactly as it seems. It feels a lot like a cop-out. So laughs and astronomical feats aside, perhaps the most substantial thing this play offers is a new cardinal rule for every social occasion: Either be honest, or hold on tight to your phone’s passcode.
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