All You Need

Helen loves war movies—Von Ryan’s Express, The Guns of Navarrone—but during a particularly sweet bit of pillow talk in Renaissance Theatreworks' Fat Pig, she hits the TV mute button so she and her new beau, Tom, can have a quiet heart-to-heart. When the talk is over and lust again calls, she stops mid-kiss to reach for the remote. The lights fade on passionate kisses, and the sounds of rumbling Panzer tanks and exploding Howitzers.
Love has always been a battlefield for theatrical provocateur Neil LaBute, but here (sound effects aside), the most devastating moments hit you like the silent knifework of a guerilla behind enemy lines.
Helen (Tanya Saracho) is the title character, a large woman who meets Tom (Braden Moran) in the play’s first scene. He is awkward and unsure; she is girlishly bold and charming. She is obviously comfortable in her size-14 skin, and he is smitten with her unaffected warmth.
LaBute takes us through the trajectory of their romance, and follows Tom’s struggles to tell his co-workers, one of whom is a former girlfriend, about his new love. While the play has a lot to say about body image and America’s obsession with muscle tone (LaBute wrote it after his own 60-pound diet see-saw), its message isn’t nearly as one-dimensional or didactic.
Instead, LaBute’s subject is the fragility of the human spirit, the hopeful—and often hopeless—ways we bolster our egos against a world of pain and uncertainty. Tom’s attraction is obviously rooted in his own insecurity. He’s a bit of a commitment-phobe, and vague about his place in the world. His bliss with Helen is reserved for the time when that world disappears and they can be “completely honest,” a phrase from the relationship lexicon that is never as simple as it sounds.
The world that comes crashing in on Tom and Helen is a doozy. Embodied in his office mates, Carter and Jeanne, it’s a maelstrom of personal complications and social ugliness. On Sunday night, a “pay what you can” performance, the cruelty drew both laughter and pause. One of the brilliant things about LaBute’s dialogue is that he pushes comedy conventions to make you laugh one moment, and then feel guilty about it the next. Director Susan Fete’s production finds the space between those moments, and makes the experience profoundly unsettling.
Casting Wayne T. Carr as Carter is one of Fete’s bolder moves, and it pays off. To hear an African-American character give LaBute’s most “edifying” monologue adds an extra layer of irony. Tom’s romance is doomed, says Carter, because it’s best to “stick to our own kind.” Whether or not you think “weight-ism” is the new racism, the speech and the exchange that follows speaks volumes about the complications of living in America.
It doesn’t hurt that Carr is spry and funny, and has a good partner in Leah Dutchin’s Jeanne, who finds just the right balance of narcissism and women-scorned frustration.
The final scene, of course, is at the beach, where we celebrate the body beautiful. It’s here you expect the dramatic fireworks, confrontations worthy of an MTV reality show. But LaBute deftly goes out with a whisper instead of a bang. With one line—again an innocent and romantic cliché--you see a brave and beautiful soul crumble. No screams or epithets. No blood and thunder. No tears. Except, perhaps, your own.

Photo by Jean Bernstein: Braden Moran and Tanya Saracho.