Eve (Jane Krakowski) and Rodger (Neil Patrick Harris) are hosting a party in their very fancy New York City apartment in Robert O’Hara’s all-star play S--t. Meet. Fan. (MCC Theater, through Dec. 15). Clint Ramos’ sumptuously designed luxe split-level penthouse—with upper terrace to observe a lunar eclipse, Manhattan skyline on dramatic, twinkling display—spans the entire width of the stage.
The characters stumble, dance, confront, and pratfall drunkenly across every inch of the living space as more and more explosive secrets are revealed in a party game you should probably never play.
As the verbal and behavioral carnage mounted (comic and deadly serious), gasps, “oh no’s,” and other exclamations emanated from the audience I sat among. If you’ve ever seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Boys in the Band, or Abigail’s Party, you know the kind of booze-sodden disaster that unfolds on stage when cocktails, wine, and spirits are poured and imbibed with witty and sour abandon.
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O’Hara, who also directs, also directed Slave Play—and, as with Jeremy O. Harris’ play, S**t. Meets. Fan. becomes about a lot more than the characters on stage, encompassing the systems of privilege and prejudice around race, gender, and sexuality they variously embody.
The shock and whiplash of the play—a battery of affairs, sexual secrets, illicit feelings, relationships in trouble, toxic friendships, and so many skeletons in so many closets—is intentional; it is intended to expose the ugliest parts of the characters, and the systems of oppression they supposedly embody.
The game that will reveal everything, as Eve airily explains it, is that every guest should put their mobile phone, face up, on the table; every call, text, and email is to be answered and read out. As one character says, so much of our lives is on our phones, this open-access reveal-all will only yield—well, the title of the play.
An early signal of the disaster ahead pings at the beginning; pre-party, Eve and daughter Sam (Genevieve Hannelius) are rowing after Eve discovered condoms in her daughter’s possession. Eve naturally assumes her daughter is about to sleep with someone; Sam is appalled at her mother’s judgmental tone—and her hypocrisy, as she’s not exactly a fading flower herself.
As soon as Sam leaves, her parents start trading barbs about the impending evening prior to the guests showing up. The nexus of the group is the men’s friendship forged through the college fraternity Rodger, Brett (Garret Dillahunt), Frank (Michael Oberholtzer), and Logan (Tramell Tillman) were part of.
Logan is Black, and—again, an early signal of what is to come—the only member of the partying group to be announced by an unseen doorman, who has been otherwise told to allow the guests to come up unannounced—as we have seen, the white guests are able to do just that.
The women are their companions, and not necessarily each other’s friends—we watch how the male and female friendship groups comically and dramatically assemble and disassemble, as one of their members finds themselves in the stocks over what one of the phones has revealed.
Constance Wu as Hannah, Frank’s new wife, is in his sexual thrall until his own trespasses are revealed. At this point her own unsure position within the group and how that folds into her Asian identity become—coupled with his utter lack of respect for her and their marriage—too much to bear.
Oberholtzer himself is, spookily, playing an adjacent character to who he played in baseball drama Take Me Out—a bro who is far more frightening, abusive, and dark in his desires and need to control than his lackadaisical personality would initially transmit.
Messing, as Claire, Brett’s wife, is a brilliant comic actor, making her body fold in on itself at moments of maximum stress and cringe. Harris and Krakowski have a great kind of anti-chemistry, a caustic wariness that mutates, quickly and inevitably, to seething loathing.
This review will not itemize the secrets and twists—but the pacing of the show, and its staging are both arresting and off-putting. The width of the stage can leave a lot of it unoccupied or unused, or shrouded in darkness when our eyes strain up to a confrontation happening on the terrace. At the beginning, basic sound is an issue.
While the phone conceit is fun—each phone becomes a vector for each character’s revelation and/or relationship tornado—the play becomes repetitive, suffering from having to constantly trump its own extremities.
The excellent Tillman-as-Logan is the play’s dramatic heart—his exhaustion at having to play within his white friends’ warped boundaries of friendship and loyalty reaches a sharp, emotional recognition of their bigotry, and even an acknowledgment of his own past complicity within it, illuminating how the marginalized operate within a majority group: the scars, compromises, benefits, and hurt—a whole, contradictory, exhausting cornucopia.
The play includes repeated exclamations of f*****, the anti-gay slur that is said here in its original iteration as insult. O’Hara means us to hear it, and hear how it is meant. For him, everything should be said (some in our audience said out loud they didn’t appreciate hearing the f-word said that much). To me, the play doesn’t make the case this group of people would say that word over and over again, so unchallenged by their own members (even as Logan notes their ease at saying it at all).
Another problem, as Hannah rightly notes at the beginning, is that these people seem horrible. How are they friends? It’s not fun spending any time with them—and so, while Logan and Hannah’s experiences as people of color are well stated, the route to their devastated conclusions about their places within the group feel unconvincing.
The white group of friends seem like frightful humans when sober, let alone drunk—unwelcoming and unpleasant. You’d invent any headache or household chore never to go Eve and Rodger’s penthouse. The gorgeous apartment is paltry window-dressing for their lack of understanding, awareness, and decency.
In a play of twists, it is not surprising that just as an eclipse feels like a surreal moment outside our everyday, so—it finally turns out—the play we have been watching may occupy its own unique orbit. Finally, as three characters silently stand on the terrace in the shadow of the eclipse, a wordless point is well-made: if so much goes unsaid, the most destructive of personal and cultural poisons silently multiply. But then, if you say them...
