A provocation that puzzles more than it provokes, Shit. Meets. Fan. has the starriest cast Off and on Broadway schlepping way down West 52nd Street to MCC Theater for…nothing to get too excited or exercised about. Hopes were high: Robert O’ Hara, of the controversial Tony nominee Slave Play, was adapting and directing what is in the U.S. an obscure Italian comedy-drama movie (2016’s Perfect Strangers, remade multiple times around the world) into a rowdy vehicle for Neil Patrick Harris, Jane Krakowski, Debra Messing, Constance Wu, and Garret Dillahunt. But something went askew in translation.
Superficially this is kin to something like Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, where ostensibly polite, upwardly mobile folks turn on each other. It begins in the swank Brooklyn digs of plastic surgeon Rodger (Harris) and Eve (Krakowski), a therapist, minutes before a Friday night party celebrating a lunar eclipse is about to transpire. Eve and 17-year-old daughter Sam (Genevieve Hannelius) are arguing over a box of condoms Eve has found; Sam says she’s holding them for a friend, but can’t resist needling her snoopy mom, telling her that she’s planning to have first-time sex that night. (In the post-Lewinsky world, oral sex doesn’t count as sex.) F-words are exchanged. (Many more F, P, A, B and other letter words, in various colorful combinations, will be thrown out, to the tsk-tsking of the elderly woman behind me, who had no fucking clue why her nice TV stars were suddenly working blue despite the title.) Rodger, cluelessly supportive of his daughter, referees. Sam leaves as the guests arrive…and the mask of gentility slips even further.
Onto the two-level set (one of those cold, steel and glass homes that connote wealth and snobbishness, coolly rendered by Clint Ramos) come harried marrieds Claire (Messing) and Brett (Dillahunt), the coupled Hannah (Wu) and Frank (Michael Oberholtzer), and Logan (Tramell Tillman), whose girlfriend dropped out of the soiree. The men are former frat brothers, which isn’t terribly convincing given how much older Rodger and Brett are, but as all the characters rub each other the wrong way with micro- and macro-aggressions it’s hard to buy any of them as friends in other ways, either. An air of bitchy discontent grows far more foul when Eve (who could use some therapy herself) suggests that everyone read aloud their incoming text and emails. This tortured gamesplaying as the calls come in is supposed to lead to whopping Big Moments of searing comic revelation for each actor. However, whether Messing is hyperventilating over Dillahunt’s “swallowing nuts,” as he mimes anal penetration (I would need charts and graphs to explain all this), it mostly falls flat, with the performers working their way to the same frenzied pitch under O’Hara’s static direction. Meanwhile Hannah and Logan (who’s black) are stuck shaking their heads at these discombobulated white people, as the over-the-edgy humor plumbs concealed sexualities, masochistic relationships, secret pregnancies, cocaine use, talking vagina apps…I could go on.
All this exertion failed to camouflage a few matters, like why these (mostly) middle-aged people are getting barraged with communiques late on a Friday evening, and what’s going on with that eclipse, anyway? Turns out there is a reason for that, as in its last few minutes the play undergoes a tonal shift that I assume was handled more felicitously in the movie. I can’t say too much about it but the seemingly moonstruck finale calls into question what’s gone before, suggesting something about the truths we avoid in the company of friends, the lies we tell ourselves or buy into to sustain our relationships, or our paranoid fantasies about the people we think we know. Maybe it’s all just a warning not to bring smartphones to parties. I don’t know; I’d muted the show by then. Good cast aside this Shit.‘s unsatisfying.
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