‘Sh-t. Meet. Fan.’ Off Broadway Review: Phone Games Upend a Night With Debra Messing, Jane Krakowski and Neil Patrick Harris
George and Martha put their guests Nick and Honey through a series of nasty games in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Add three more visitors and a bunch of iPhones, and you get Robert O’Hara’s new comedy, “Sh-t. Meet. Fan.,” which opened Monday at the MCC Theater.
Jane Krakowski, playing a miniskirt-wearing wife and mother of a miniskirt-wearing teenager (Genevieve Hannelius), hosts with her dull husband (Neil Patrick Harris) a most unusual party. They all gather ostensibly to watch a lunar eclipse from the spacious terrace of the couple’s Dumbo apartment (fabulous set by Clint Ramos). Krakowski’s Eve suggests that everybody, including their five guests (Garret Dillahunt, Debra Messing, Michael Oberholtzer, Tramell Tillman and Constance Wu), keep their iPhones on and face up on the living room coffee table. The rule is, when the phone goes off, the owner must put it on speaker so everyone in the room can hear the conversation. As someone at the party puts it, this is the grown-up version of Truth or Dare.
As with the characters in Albee’s play, a lot of alcohol lubricates the evening, as well as lines and lines of cocaine. Faster than a toilet can overflow when loaded up with too many Magum condoms (Eve is aghast at what she finds in her daughter’s purse), old secrets gurgle up to the surface at this fete. It helps that the four men at the party belonged to the same fraternity in college. That they are still close friends is a bit head-scratching, since their careers run the gamut from a plastic surgeon to an ambulance driver who wants to transition to being a nurse.
There are other wild, incredulous set-ups. Most unbelievable is Tillman’s bachelor switching phones with Dillahunt’s husband, who has an addiction to porn. The party’s sole single guy harbors a far greater secret than repeatedly receiving videos of a talking vagina.
“S.M.F.” leaves unexplained the same conundrum as “Take Me Out.” Why has the baseball star of Richard Greenberg’s play stayed in touch with his best friend who’s a chronic bigot? Did the friend’s extreme prejudice not make itself known a year or two ago? Why didn’t the baseball star say something at the time? Or better yet, why didn’t he just get another best friend long ago? In “S.M.F.,” two characters of color clearly hate the company they keep, but O’Hara gives us no indication why these two continue to keep that hateful company.
O’Hara, who also directs, makes sense of everything in a conclusion that resorts to a ploy used long ago on a famous nighttime TV soap opera.
“S.M.F.” lives up to that title. The play delivers far fewer laughs than a decent production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But what it lacks in genuine wit – many of O’Hara’s zingers land flat — this s–t show compensates with sheer outrageousness as the phone calls quickly turn X-rated. O’Hara skewers white privilege and the pathetic sex fantasies it unleashes. In the process, he creates a super-stud character that borrows a lot from Mandingo.
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