Review: Fat Cat Killers, a Revenge Comedy for Luigi Mangione Stans

The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson shocked the nation—not so much as an instance of politically motivated gun violence, which is all too common in the United States, but by the reaction it provoked. While some observers were horrified, others took grim satisfaction in the death of an insurance executive who had delivered so much shareholder value by overseeing the mass denial of claims. Others went a step further, elevating the photogenic alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, to the status of TikTok idol and secular saint. It was an unmistakable sign that, in certain circumstances, vigilante violence had become acceptable for millions of Americans.

Adam Szymkowicz’s Fat Cat Killers, now playing at the Gene Frankel Theatre, would seem to have arrived at the exact right moment (Szymkowicz actually wrote the script over a decade ago). It’s about Steve (Christopher Lee) and Michael (David Carl), two recently fired office workers who seek revenge by planning to kidnap their ex-firm’s CEO and hold him for ransom. Potentially a searing indictment of corporate greed, Fat Cat Killers is in fact a sluggish buddy comedy, unlikely to satisfy anyone’s revolutionary itch, nor tickle our funny bones. It’s Office Space meets Dumb and Dumber—and we all feel dumber for having committed 100 minutes of our lives to it.

We suspect Steve doesn’t have much going on upstairs from the first scene, in which he interviews for a management position by arguing that, if he were paid more, he might do some work for a change. At the bar after work, Michael suggests that his friend could hack into the payroll and boost their salaries (he did work at the Apple Genius bar, after all). Unsurprisingly, both men are quickly fired, leading Michael to recommend murder as the appropriate recourse—but maybe after they have gotten some of the $10 million pay package the boss took home last year. Without fully agreeing, Steve shrugs his assent.

Lee and Carl have an idiotic chemistry that I’m sure some people will find charming, with Carl driving this clown car as Lee wags his tongue out the passenger window like a golden retriever. Steve’s indecisiveness (he utters the phrase “I don’t know” 16 times in the script) seems to be his fatal flaw, leading him to be railroaded into a felony at the side of a dude-bro psychopath. One can imagine them in a production of Waiting for Godot, though not one for which you would want to return for the second act.

Andrew Block’s direction is not tight enough for absurdism, nor is Szymkowicz’s prose sharp enough to qualify as agitprop. Tony Lepore’s sound design, which underlines key dramatic beats with original percussion, is the most rigorous element in the production. Meanwhile, Scott Fetterman’s set has the disadvantage of being both overdesigned and less-than-useful, with a baffling upstage wall of ink-blotted paper adding absolutely nothing to the story. It’s not so much a Rorschach test as a soiled Chipotle napkin you step over on your way back from lunch break.

The arrival of the third character, CEO Dave Russell (Philip Cruise), momentarily extends our hope that Fat Cat Killers might actually deliver a decent satire of corporate America. Cruise looks straight out of CEO daddy central casting, with his white hair and hard expression that tells all onlookers, I do CrossFit and can ruin your life. He certainly exudes the smoothness of a man who lives and dies by PowerPoint, making it seem eminently reasonable when he demands a commission for negotiating his own ransom (Steve and Michael are prepared to accept a lowball offer, but Dave goes for the big ask and succeeds). It’s clear that Szymkowicz thinks the most important quality for an American executive is shamelessness; and on that point, at least, he’s correct.

But Szymkowicz has little to say about the forces that turn office drones into terrorists, how aristocracy presenting itself as meritocracy corrodes social order, or how market incentives break down in the face of irrational violence. A late-play monologue, in which Steve encourages others to follow in their footsteps, is even less enlightening than Luigi’s tweet-sized manifesto, with Steve arguing, “I mean everyone steals paper and pens and paper clips, but when you steal lots of money, well, someone should kill you for it.” It’s a laugh line, but by the time we get there, even the polite titters have gone as cold as an insurance executive on West 54^th Street.

It all feels like a missed opportunity at a time when popular nihilism and political violence are on the rise. Fat Cat Killers is not the play we need to guide us through the suddenly wide-open Overton window, but it’s probably the play we deserve in this profoundly stupid chapter of American history.