The American playwright/screenwriter Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things) has spent much of his career experimenting, gloves off, in the laboratory of human experiments gone wrong, observing people behave badly.  That’s why Fat Pig, the evening of LaBute at Northern Light, is such a surprise.  Not, I hasten to add, because the title isn’t a slap, or because you aren’t tense with dread.  It is, and you are, respectively.  And not because Trevor Schmidt’s production walks on eggshells to spare your feelings. It doesn’t.
            It’s just that the protagonists are genuinely sympathetic, and you can’t help feeling the potential for happiness—be brave, call it l-o-v-e—they hold.  The 2004 play chronicles the blossoming romance between Tom (Skye Brandon), a corporate up-and-comer, and Helen (Carlye Windsor), an appealingly quick-witted, self-deprecating librarian who happens to be X-large.
            To meet Helen, as embodied by a delightful newcomer Windsor, is to recoil even harder from the title slur.  In the intro scene deliberately extended beyond comfort, and set to the Mika Song Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), our large heroine is chowing down in a crowded food court.  Later, Tom happens by with his tray.  They banter (“I don’t only eat; I can be coaxed into other things,” she teases); they fall for each other.
            The dynamic of the play is that their affection is set against the world of Tom’s office, where his co-workers snipe and torment him mercilessly about his new girlfriend.  Carter, conjured in a performance of mesmerizing comic malice by Jesse Gervais, is an expert on the cruelty of the world.  You watch with fascinated horror as Carter makes a lucid case for conformity.  “We’re all just one step away from being what frightens us,” he says.  People who are “different” are “what we could be” with one back flip gone wrong or one carton of Oreos too many.  And we hate them for it.
            As written, Jeannie is a thinner (gawd, there’s that word) character.  But Lora Brovold creates from this scanty material a portrait of startling venom and grievance as the co-worker with whom Tom has had an on-off thing.  In fact, Jeannie is so vividly pathological in Brovold’s performance that she overtakes the play’s point about “ordinary” social forces stacked against Tom.  When she calls Helen a “fat sow,” it’s mid-stream psychotic episode.
            It’s Tom’s story, in the end.  What Brandon, a wonderfully natural actor, gives us is a decent, ordinary guy, whose natural god manners take him into a territory where something more is asked of him.  He knows the potential rewards.  But he’s too smart not to suspect his own weakness and cowardice.  It’s a performance that subtly mixes apprehension and anticipation.
            Tom’s chemistry with Windsor occasionally falters, partly, I think, the fault of LaBute's writing at crucial moments that leaves Helen flat.  But our sense of foreboding continues to mount, and get unbearable when Tom finally agrees to take his love to the office beach party.
            If you eat when you’re stressed, you’ll go out for a bite after the show.  If you shun food under tension, you’ll be popping a Rolaids.  Either way, you’ll be talking.

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