The Money Shot Theater review

“…suck on that, you little bitch!”: This bon mot is the first line of dialogue in The Money Shot, and little else in the play surpasses it in wit. Neil LaBute’s snide comedy, about movie stars and the romantic partners dragged along in their finicky wakes, actually begins a few moments earlier, with a lightning storm of paparazzi flashbulbs. It’s as though LaBute shared the belief, sometimes attributed to 19th-century Native Americans, that being photographed stole your soul. That might account for the utter spiritual and intellectual vacancy he ascribes to his characters, albeit in ways that are ultimately no less vacant. Fred Weller, charismatic as ever and impressively fit, plays Steve, a moronic boor of an action-flick star with a young, blond airhead of a wife, Missy (Crovatin), whom he treats like a dog. Elizabeth Reaser is Karen, a classical beauty sculpted from crumbling clay (and a raft of cultivated showbiz mannerisms); her girlfriend, Bev (Thorne), is a butch, Ivy-educated former athlete who works in postproduction. They have gathered in the Hollywood Hills to discuss the logistics of a sex scene that Steve and Karen are set to film with an envelope-pushing director from Belgium (which Steve doltishly insists is not part of Europe). How much of their bodies are they willing to expose to keep their aging fame alive?