Masculinity has never been quite so toxic, nor white privilege so obnoxious, as it is in Robert O’Hara’s scathingly funny new comedy Shit. Meet. Fan. O’Hara wrote and directed the zippy, star-filled production, which opened Tuesday at Off Broadway’s MCC Theater and seems ripe for a lucrative transfer to Broadway. He’s started by taking the premise of the 2016 Italian film Perfect Strangers — about seven middle-aged friends assembling for a dinner party from hell — and transposed it to a uniquely American milieu.
The setting is the Architecture Digest-ready Dumbo/Brooklyn duplex penthouse (designed by Clint Ramos) of plastic surgeon Rodger (Neil Patrick Harris) and his therapist wife, Eve (Jane Krakowski). We first see Eve freaking out about the discovery of a box of condoms in the room of her Swarthmore-bound daughter, Sam (Genevieve Hannelius). It’s pretty clear that Eve is a bad therapist, or at least a willfully myopic helicopter parent, but that may be the least of her faults as the evening sets up a series of embarrassing revelations.
As Sam departs for an evening that will no doubt put those condoms to good use, her parents begin greeting Rodger’s old frat buddies: Brett (Garret Dillahunt), who’s awaiting trial on vehicular manslaughter charges, arrives with his with heavy-drinking wife, Claire (Debra Messing); paramedic Frank (Michael Oberholtzer) brings his newlywed wife, Hannah (Constance Wu); and the freshly jobless, perpetually single Logan (Tramell Tillman) comes with apologies for a new girlfriend he says “has a fever.”
There’s something off about this group, whom we learn get together a few times a year (including on skiing vacations) despite no obvious signs of affection or common interests, aside from perhaps the guys’ willingness to cover for each other’s indiscretions between surreptitious bumps of cocaine. (We learn that another buddy of theirs has just left his wife and kids for a 22-year-old waitress, a development that only surprised the women.)
Eve has an ingenious if misguided idea to shake things up: a 21st-century version of Truth or Dare in which they all forfeit their cellphones and allow every call, every text, every Whatsapp message to be shared with the entire group. It’s an artificial set-up, but then this is a comedy that’s built on artifice more than reality, with often uproarious results.
The first call to come in, from an unknown number, just breathes heavily and suggestively over Frank’s speaker phone — and turns out to be Rodger on the portable landline from an upstairs bedroom. But that prank call sets the tone for a series of sex-related revelations, reversals, and recrimination that O’Hara as both writer and director builds with the clocklike precision of a classic slamming-door bedroom farce. You may see some of the story beats coming — when Brett persuades Logan to swap his same-model phone, of course they both manage to blow up their precarious relationships — but there are enough left-field surprises to keep you entertained, including in a coda just before the curtain when the dust appears to have settled.
What’s more, O’Hara has added some canny elements of social commentary into the mix. Logan, the lone Black character, at times appears to be a stand-in for the author himself, an outsider who’s managed to gain a degree of insider status but never feels a true sense of belonging. (He could be an older cousin of the lead character in O’Hara’s loosely autobiographical 2014 comedy Bootycandy.) Tillman delivers a believable sense of a man whose yearning for camaraderie comes at a cost he’s only now beginning to realize. After all, Logan is the one who privately extends a hand to Hannah, who’s all too aware of her newbie status since she’s been married for just a month and is a decade younger than the others. “I just know how I feel sometimes… Being the only one,” Logan tells her, his voice getting fainter as his advice grows more urgent. “Don’t let them rattle you. … Don’t let them see any fear. … Or they’ll eat you up.”
This group of entitled jerks appears to have a ravenous appetite for mutual mass destruction, and the sniping becomes ever more vicious as long-buried secrets bubble to the surface. I wish O’Hara had leaned more into the class-based power imbalances of the group, which range from the dual-income penthouse-dwelling hosts Rodger and Eve to paramedic Frank and school athletics instructor Logan. It’s not clear how Frank can afford to join his college pals on the slopes or to keep all his romantic plates spinning, a number that grows precariously larger as the show progresses.
O’Hara has a gift for writing comic set pieces, like a musical interlude set to a Nicki Minaj classic, as well as for punchlines that recall the cutting putdowns of ’80s sitcoms like Designing Women and The Golden Girls, as when Rodger dismisses Eve’s claims of political activism: “The only marching she’s done is to a sample sale at Balenciaga.” The cast, most veterans of long-running sitcoms, seems perfectly aligned to roles that call for a tricky blend of grounded cartoonishness. Most are playing variations on characters that are familiar to TV fans, and that built-in good will tempers some of the nastiness on display. The actors work together seamlessly to make some fundamentally unlikable characters entertaining enough to tolerate for a few hours, waiting for their well-deserved uppance to come.
SHIT. MEETS. FAN.
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Dec. 15
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