Roger (Neil Patrick Harris) and his wife Eve (Jane Krakowski) host their friends for a cocktail party on the night of the June 2020 lunar eclipse.  The men are fraternity brothers and haven’t quite outgrown their college years.  Brett (Garret Dillahunt) is recovering from a car accident where he hit and killed a homeless man.  His wife, Claire (Debra Messing), is drinking too much.  Frank (Michael Oberholtzer) is a fuckboy who has finally married Hannah (Constance Wu), and Logan (Tramell Tillman) is a high school gym teacher who arrives without his new girlfriend.  Except for Logan and Hannah, they are all rich and white.  There is almost no mention of COVID, though we are only three months into the pandemic and six away from a vaccine.

To enliven the festivities, Eve proposes a game: everyone will leave their cell phones on the table, upturned, and at full volume.  All messages have to be read aloud and all calls answered on speaker phone.  Robert O’Hara’s Shit. Meet. Fan. is based on the Italian movie Perfect Strangers, but it takes the premise of the classic postwar American play—guests come over and secrets are spilled—and turbocharges it.  To spoil those of just one of the characters: Roger has not told Eve he is in therapy, he has not told her he is planning to ask her for a divorce, he has not told her he provided their daughter with condoms, and he has not told her that he has some kind of sadomasochistic sexual relationship with Frank.

There are some funny and some shocking moments in Shit. Meet. Fan., but the structure is familiar from overuse, and the sheer volume of secrets begins to strain credibility.  Perhaps the ultra-rich really are this awful, but it’s hard to believe that such a network of lies has been flawlessly maintained until this evening.  By the end, I found myself asking, why are these people still friends?

In a prefatory note, O’Hara writes, “This play is a blistering vulgar satire on Male Toxicity and White Privilege.”  Of the three adjectives, he certainly hit vulgar.  The other two, I’m not so sure.

Shit. Meet. Fan. ran through December 15th at the Newman Mills Theater.  511 W. 52nd Street.  New York, NY.  1 hour 45 minutes.  No intermission. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes.