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That would be satire. For as much as The Money Shot examines bonds between spouses—and friends, and enemies, and coworkers—it also looks at how Hollywood culture refracts these concerns into something deeper, darker, and more devastating. In doing so, LaBute unlocks a trenchant universality by exploring how our genders define our roles in life (and vice versa), so you don't need to be, say, a movie star to be riveted. Two movie stars are, however, at the center of the play. The first is Steve (Fred Weller), an approaching-50 action here of the Tom Cruise variety who's stuck in a series of "franchise pictures" in which he has to keep searching for new excuses to take off his shirt. The second is Karen (Elizabeth Reaser), who's aging herself and trying to revive her dying dramatic career by getting back into films after making a name (and myriad truckloads of money) sponsoring every imaginable product and service under the California sun. The two have just landed a big new blockbuster together—titled Jack-Hammer!—and are tasked with drumming up the needed publicity for it. They've concocted an outlandish plan that's sure to do the trick, if only Steve can get his wife, Missy (Gia Crovatin), and Karen can get her wife, Bev (Callie Thorne), to agree to it. Yep, it's that bad. (The specifics won't be revealed here, but they're not too distantly related to the play's title.) All this alone would be enough to energize LaBute in most circumstances, but he piles on the layers of emotional complexity. Steve is concerned about the stunningly gorgeous 24-year-old Missy will let her superb legs "get all thick and cheesy in the back," and has relegated her to a strict diet that's left her starving. And though Bev is in "the business," too (as a lower-level editor), Karen supports her in every way financially, even to the tune of building the Hollywood Hills mansion in which the four are presently congregating. (Derek McLane designed the excellent, stylish set.) With gender, age, class, and sexuality all colliding in ever-shifting, and ever-more-outlandish combinations, it's almost impossible to not score a resounding success. The writing is pure LaBute: confused misdirection, unearned superiority, and hit-you-from behind gags that leave you at once bewildered, wracked with laughter, and, strangely, enlightened. Director Terry Kinney has choreographed and paced the quartet's interactions with razor-edged acuity, and ensured that each moment is just as silly and, on occasion, disturbing as it needs to be. Dominating the proceedings is Reaser, who may be best known for television (Grey's Anatomy, Saved, The Ex List), but proves herself here a natural creature of the theatre. (She last appeared, to noticeably lesser effect, in the 2012 revival of How I Learned to Drive.) Statuesque in figure but searing melodrama in delivery, she scales the heights of absurdity in depicting a multimillionairess who is, against all odds, on her last ropes. Flopping about the stage and whining with utterly self-examining presence, her Karen is every bit the star who knows exactly what's at stake. So committed is Reaser to making Karen a jolting representation of industry lunacy that no one else is quite able to match her. Crovatin comes closest, her Missy a mistress of physical comedy à la John Ritter in his Three's Company days, but at the same time a staunch realist who's not as dumb as everyone wants her to be. Thorne overplays Bev's natural butch tendencies, and doesn't quite find the quirky, this-can't-be-happening personality she's looking for. Weller, though physically ideal for the part, portrays Steve as so dumb—almost brain-dead—in voice and attitude that the character's necessary naïveté never shows through. That's the critical missing element of this production, as Steve is the catalyst for everything that happens: the symbol of a business that uses people without understanding what it's doing or how, and promotes the lowest-common denominator every chance it gets. Steve eventually pays the price for being a PR-hungry dolt, and he drags Karen right along with him—it's perhaps LaBute's greatest joke that even the two biggest names with the most zeroes on their paychecks aren't immune from falling victim to their own foolishness. You can aspire to more, he seems to be saying, with almost the same forcefulness he did in his 2008 masterpiece reason to be pretty. This play lacks that one's appealing intimacy, and, for that matter, the caustic edge of In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things. But it doesn't need those extremes, finding instead in the everyday trials of entertainment elite a compelling reinterpretation of the problems we all deal with. If you've never thought about how far you'd go to get ahead and stay ahead, or how far you'd let someone you love go, you will after seeing—and laughing almost non-stop at—The Money Shot.
The Money Shot
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