Review: Neil Patrick Harris and Debra Messing Reveal Cellphone Secrets in Shit. Meet. Fan.

We have passcodes on our cellphones for good reasons, like protecting ourselves from crooks. But is that main reason? What we might not want to admit is that we store a lot of secrets in those tiny electrical boxes and we’re afraid that someone might peek inside if we happen to leave ours unlocked. What would happen if the lives (and lies) we hide in our devices were suddenly exposed to people we actually know?

Robert O’Hara tosses that question into a roomful of boozy friends in his new comedy Shit. Meet. Fan., now making its world premiere at MCC Theater. He directs a starry cast led by Neil Patrick Harris and Jane Krakowoski in a play that’s as funny as it is discomforting. If you leave the theater not wondering if you should change your PIN, you probably weren’t paying attention.

O’Hara has introduced modern life into an ever-popular genre of American theater: the booze-infused tell-all. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee gave us George and Martha, that famously dysfunctional couple who play a game of “get the guests” in a chaotic evening of brandy and confessions. O’Hara clearly knows he’s tapping into that dramatic vein while adding a technological wild card into the mix. His dysfunctional couple, however, comprises the less openly vicious Rodger (Harris) and Eve (Krakowski). They’re well-off white New Yorkers in their 40s who are throwing a party for some friends so that they can all watch a lunar eclipse together.

There’s Brett (Garret Dillahunt) and Claire (Debra Messing), a couple who are having some legal troubles due to a car accident, fueling Claire’s inclination to self-medicate with whatever alcohol is handy. Then there’s newly married Frank (Michael Oberholtzer) and Hannah (Constance Wu). He’s a bona fide horndog who’s stoked about having an Asian wife, and she’s still texting with an ex who’s in treatment for sex addiction. And all that’s before the drinking.

Dressed to impress (upper-crust-casual costumes by Sarafina Bush), everyone is curious to meet Deanna, the girlfriend of unemployed phys ed teacher Logan (Tramell Tillman), the only Black member of the group. “She probably is white,” Logan’s frat bro Frank speculates before Logan arrives without her. Meanwhile, the others start getting tanked and gossiping about the affairs and secrets of friends who aren’t there.

Thinking that tea-spilling might be more fun with people who are there, Eve says, “Let’s play a game,” and then suggests they toss their phones on the coffee table and allow everyone to hear every text, email, and phone call that comes in. Let the “guest-getting” begin.

The idea of seven friends participating in a game as potentially dangerous as this seems far-fetched, but then again, get enough liquor involved and anything’s possible. In any case, over the course of an hour and 45 minutes, we learn a lot of nasty things about these people.

And the cast is terrific. Wu gives us a hilariously disgusted Hannah, who bonds with Logan over these obtuse white people while freaking out as she learns the details of her husband’s sex session with three triplets in college. Dillahunt and Tillman also get big laughs when Brett and Logan decide to switch phones to cover for one of Brett’s silly transgressions, leading Messing to a show-stealing episode that’s so funny she seems about to break character any second. Let’s just call her performance absolute “nuts.”

It wouldn’t be fair to reveal more, when every revelation throughout the play is a spoiler. Though the scenes get big laughs, O’Hara’s humor also has sharp edges that slice like paper cuts. “I need more Black friends,” says Logan, and we can see why. While O’Hara doesn’t let any of his characters off the hook, his three self-absorbed white frat bros are distinctly unlikable — operating by a completely different set of social codes and believing that any favor they’ve done for Logan gives them a racial get-out-of-jail-free card. They don’t need to open their cellphones to expose themselves when their mouths do just fine. O’Hara wants the audience to laugh at the familiarity of it, and then squirm.

Despite some stiff dialogue at the beginning involving a box of condoms and Rodger and Eve’s daughter Sam (Genevieve Hannelius, giving Gen Z realness), the comedy crackles as the friends’ lies are revealed and their cluelessness about each other is exposed (Cookie Jordan’s flowing hair design for Krakowski conveys Eve’s obliviousness with a single flip).

Clint Ramos’s set, a well-appointed New York apartment with a full bar and view of the Brooklyn Bridge, oozes steely wealth and aloofness, along with a balcony shadowed just enough (lighting by Alex Jainchill) to hide Frank and Rodger while they sneak bumps of coke. And in a memorable scene, Palmer Heffernan’s sound design blasts E.U.’s funky “Da Butt” as the white folks claim the song as their own, and Logan and Hannah exchange a glance that says, “These people are not our friends.”

What about the eclipse? That event itself gets eclipsed by the events of the evening — or does it? O’Hara’s provocative ending will leave you thinking about just how fragile the bonds that hold us together really are, whether you change your passcode or not.