Interview: Robert O’Hara on the Provocations and Manipulations of ‘Shit. Meet. Fan.’

Don’t get too comfortable at a play written or directed by queer Black provocateur Robert O’Hara. Whether it’s original work like Insurrection: Holding History, Bootycandy, and Barbecue, or plays like Jeremy O. Harris’s searing Slave Play, which he directed, you can expect to be shocked or disturbed—often while laughing out loud.

O’Hara has described his latest play, Shit. Meet. Fan., as “a blistering vulgar satire on male toxicity and white privilege.” Now playing at the MCC Theater, this explosive drawing-room comedy, which gleefully keeps both its characters and audience off-balance throughout, centers on a group of friends gathered together for drinks on the night of an eclipse. The evening takes a toxic turn when the hostess proposes a game: Everyone must leave their phones in plain view and share any texts or voice messages they receive during their alcohol-fueled gathering.

Shit. Meet. Fan, featuring a nimble ensemble cast that includes seasoned comedy stars like Neil Patrick Harris, Debra Messing, and Jane Krakowski, is already a sold-out hit. I chatted with O’Hara a week before the show’s recent opening to discuss the origins of the play, satirizing his characters’ behaviors, and encouraging complicity between the audience and the production.

Shit. Meet. Fan. is adapted from the 2016 Italian film Perfect Strangers. Is that why it feels so different from your previous work for the stage?

It definitely is different. This is the first time I’ve taken something from film to the stage. The producers of Perfect Strangers approached me about doing an English stage version. The movie had been remade [in other languages] something like 28 times. It was another person’s story and I didn’t have to come up with all of the plot points, but they gave me free reign to live inside it, enhance and play around with it a bit. My first reaction was that the title Perfect Strangers was too polite for me. The premise of the movie is that everyone shares their secrets, and I think, in America, our secrets are a little bit darker. Also, I wanted to incorporate an idea of race inside the story—and more toxicity, white privilege, and entitlement. That was something that was exciting to me because, in America, we’re so entrenched in not dealing with race in many ways.

Did you find the notion that the information on our phones can damage our relationships to be especially intriguing about the film?

We put so much of our imagination and our interior selves into this device. My phone is pretty rancid because I have crazy friends and there are certain things that I certainly cannot explain to the general public, nor should I have to, because it’s my privacy. Just the idea of, you know, when someone thinks that they’ve misplaced their phone, there’s a panic involved. I think I’ve always felt—and this was before even cellphones, when the internet began—that we’re able to live other lives through technology. I think every new technology is sometimes used to embed secrets and to add some sort of contradiction to how we walk through life. In our culture, just the idea of someone thinking something or having something or saying something can drive us into states of jealousy, panic, even elation. It could ruin your day—as you can see in the play.

These days it’s rare to see a play with seven people on stage in the same space all the same time. Was it a challenge to write for these multiple, interacting voices?

My work on the classics prepared me for this type of work, but it’s a challenge because, of course, as you have to calibrate everyone’s performance—as a director, but also as a writer. You have to make sure that everyone is on a track of the story, and the story continues to propel itself forward even as the revelations happen. How do you not steal focus, and how do you give focus to the moment when something big was just revealed and then the next moment it’s someone else’s spotlight? And there’s the chaotic nature of it all. People see chaos on the stage and they think, “Oh, people have free reign,” but all of that is very planned out and very specific.

With the truth game and the spilling of secrets, Shit. Meet. Fan. bears kinship with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? and Boys in the Band. Would you agree?

Virginia Woolf—that was a very big part of my thinking about this play, because of the amount of alcohol and drugs being used. I love Boys in the Band. Just the viciousness of it all—these friendships that dissolve. There’s a lot self-hatred involved, and a lot of jealousy from the very beginning. You know, these people [in Shit. Meet. Fan.] are all friends. Why is it that no one just gets up and goes “I’m done. I don’t want to do this game anymore”? I think there’s a sense of, “I’m not going to fail at this even as I sit here with this huge cloud over me. Someone else’s turn will come up and move the cloud away from me for a little bit. And it helps if I’m drunk.” There’s also the premise of this taking place on the night of an eclipse. We see our shadow selves, which is what really the play is about—what cannot be said, and what we don’t say in polite company.

You satirize the behaviors of the affluent privileged white friends in the play, but you don’t let the two people of color at the party off the hook easily either.

I often say that everyone is welcome and no one is safe. It’s not just finger pointing at bad white people. Because when we allow them to participate in that, we give license to that behavior and we’re sort of indicted ourselves. Even the audience laughs along with these people and then the laughter turns on them. It’s like, “Oh, you’ve been laughing at this but now what about this? Is this funny still?” It becomes a darker space. Both the people of color [in the play] have also participated in a large part of their life in this space. The Black character who’s participated in the game has thought this was a space he actually deserved and owned. You have to reconcile the fact that you chose this willingly [because] this was something that made you special.

And they move in the same social circle…

Totally. There’s also a sense of erasure of who you are. Even the sort of jokes that [the others] tell and get away with. No one picks up the inherent racism that’s inside the joking around, also the homophobia and sexism. It lands differently on different skin colors.

One thing also that’s unique about the play is that the revelations aren’t private. You could have [the others] outside the scene and just have two people realize something, but in this play, seven people are realizing that you’re different or you have a secret. Being able to negotiate a secret with one person is different than being able to negotiate it with six other people in the room.

You’ve cast a group of actors well-known for their comedic skills in this production, is this intentional?

We have very familiar faces on stage, and the audience thinks that they’re in their living room because they’ve seen many of these people on their television; there’s a sense of comfort there. And so I lure the audience in and then I say, “Oh, but this is the underneath.” Very early on you decide if you’re on board with them or against them.

You’ve also made Shit. Meet. Fan. very funny.

Yes, because that allows you to be comfortable. So when I choke you, you don’t see it coming. I think that humor and laughter also indicts the audience in a way. There’s an implicit complicity in [the play] happening live in real time. People around you can experience it to the point that someone may find something funny and you, in fact, find it very, very disturbing. You know, it’s difficult to hide that in live theater. A movie doesn’t stop when you laugh, but in the theater, you stop the performance when you laugh because you and the characters wait in order to hear the next line. So in many ways the audience is the other character in the theater. Being able to use them, manipulate them, and indict them is like a roller coaster ride for me.