I surprised myself by liking this play. I thought that after having seen a scene from it, I wouldn't be the biggest fan but I really like Neil LaBute's writing style, this is the second play of his I have read and I really really enjoy it.

I wasn't a big fan of many characters in this play but the two main leads I think are very well written and would be beautiful to see done but two vulnerable actors willing to take on this kind of material.

I doubt this play would be for everyone but I think LaBute poured some of his own struggle into the words in this play and they comes across as real and truthful and not staged or overly crafted as some 'good' plays tend to be.

It was a very quick read but it contained mountains of things to mime character wise and I think anyone who likes theatre or who is a part of the theatre world should be reading more Labute!

This play makes me feel conflicted. I read it once I heard that a revival was being produced with Chrissy Metz (a hero of mine) but don’t understand why I should love this show. I want to like it. I like the idea of a female protagonist who is very overweight and fine with it. I like that Helen doesn’t need validated. I relate to her use of humor to defend herself against what people say about her. But that’s where my applause ends. Each and every one of the characters were, at their core, unlikable. Tom was disappointing. Helen was snide and patronizing. Carter and Jeannine are just utterly horrible human beings. I respect the need to display individuals as flawed and problematic but I didn’t understand the attraction or friendship on a personality level, overarching weight point on Helen’s part notwithstanding. The preface and the premise of this play give the impression of wanting to be honest, but ultimately fall flat and end up disappointing at the end.

I'm not crying. You're fucking crying. Fantastic. Heart wrenching. So very painfully true.

Helen’s quirky because she watches war movies. She’s “not like other girls.” The other female, Jeannie, slaps men, her coworkers, IN THE OFFICE, because she’s a crazy ex girlfriend. Labute continues his “social commentary” plays about sexism with our protagonist being a wishy-washy casual sexist who for some reason is best friends with the most sexist sexist that ever sexisted. I read this right after finishing The Pillowman, a masterpiece, which only made this experience all the more miserable.

Reading this dialogue gave me a headache. And the female characters' dialogue was clearly written by a man. And fuck, Tom is a gaslighting piece of shit.

No actual completion came about at the end of this play. Helen's character was the only one I had any real feelings for, the other characters were just bratty and caricatures of other stereotypical characters. This is my second time reading him and I feel a little disappointed by this particular play. LaBute often writes on interesting topics, but it seems like his plays end up without having any real type of closure. So much more could've been done in terms of plot and character development, yet LaBute just left us with a bare shell of a story. Not to mention the main character stays stagnant throughout the whole story and doesn't really talk for longer than a few lines at a time untill the last scene of the play where he belts out a weak monologue. This would make a great subpar made-for-tv-movie.

Absolutely disgusting, and terribly written.

I've written about my disdain for Neil LaBute before. Not only are his plays incredibly mean-spirited and misogynistic, but they're not really well-written either, so even if he IS doing something subtly skewering misogynistic characters, the writing isn't good enough to adequately distinguish between the opinions of the characters and the writers.

Case in point: Fat Pig, a play about a man coming to terms with his overweight girlfriend. Gag. Mistake number one is centering this play on the guy. Neil LaBute's protagonists, from what I've read, are ALWAYS guys, and they're always milquetoast and uninteresting, with stuff happening TO them rather than them making stuff happen.

But the worst part of Fat Pig is just the premise. Tom (the protagonist) starts dating a woman larger than himself and his co-workers ("friends", the play charitably calls them) make fun of him for it. And not only make fun of him for it, but one of his female "friends" keeps picking on his girlfriend because she herself is attracted to Tom. It's just . . . gross.

The whole play is horrendously gross, and it LaBute doesn't put in enough effort to justify its grossness. Maybe there IS a subsection of society that's not okay with fat people. (Okay, we KNOW there's a subsection of society that's not okay with fat people.) And maybe there's a Tom out there who's so fucking shallow that his friends criticizing his girlfriend's weight would actually give him fucking pause. But what does that ultimately prove? An asshole can't get over standard conventions of beauty? That standard conventions of beauty are dumb? Does LaBute assume that the majority of people out there would find this a worthwhile topic of debate?

It's been a while since I read this, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but the feeling has stuck with me: disgust. Disgust at such a shallow and gross play. Even if I didn't vehemently disagree with the fundamental premise, I'd still hate this play. Characters are one-note and have little room to grow and the dialogue is just horrendous. Stilted, awkward, gross. Gross! I'd still say check this out, because it's fascinating how terrible it is. But ugh. Fuck Neil LaBute.