Fat Pig

Fat Pig
Fat Pig 2008 London Run poster
Written by	Neil Labute
Characters	Helen Tom Carter Jeannie
Date premiered	2004
Place premiered	Off-Broadway
Original language	English
Genre	Comedy
Official site

Fat Pig is an American play by Neil LaBute. The play premiered Off-Broadway in 2004 and won the 2005 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play. The play had its London premiere in 2008 and was nominated for Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. The play involves a romantic relationship between a plus-size woman and a young professional man, whose friend denigrates the woman as being "fat".

Fat Pig tells the story of Tom, a stereotypical professional businessman in a large city, who falls for a very plus-size librarian named Helen. They meet in a crowded restaurant at lunchtime and get to talking. Tom is taken with her brash acceptance of the way people see her and her in-your-face honesty. He asks her for her phone number and they start to date. A couple of weeks later, Carter, Tom’s best friend, starts to notice the signs of Tom having a new girlfriend. He obnoxiously pesters him for information about the new girl and in order to get it mentions it in front of a woman from accounting, Jeannie, who has been seeing Tom on-and-off for a while. She gets very upset which gets Tom to admit that he is “sort of” seeing this new woman in his life. Carter asks Tom what he is doing that night, and Tom says he is busy. Carter knows then that he is meeting Helen at a restaurant Tom frequents, Tom denies it and says it is a business dinner with people from the Chicago branch of their firm. Carter, not believing him, stops by the restaurant and sees them together. He approaches them and introduces himself to Helen, and she excuses herself to go to the restroom. While she is gone Carter thoroughly insults her weight and calling her a lot of horrible things ('fat pig' among others), not knowing that this is Tom’s new girlfriend. He assumes then that Tom was telling the truth about the people coming in from Chicago and that Helen is one of his business contacts, since he thought that Tom would never date anyone that “fat”.

Later that week, Jeannie pays a visit to Tom in his office. She has found out that no people from Chicago came to visit. She demands to know what is going on with him and her and he says that he is not interested in her and will never be again. Earlier, she and Carter had been gossiping about the “fat cow from Chicago,” which is how Jeannie found out about the whole thing. So once Tom says that it wasn’t a business dinner, she flips out and smacks him, hurt that he would pick someone like Helen (an obese woman) over her. Carter looks on and sort of apologizes for being rude about Helen, saying that he didn’t know she was his girlfriend. He asks to see a picture and after a lot of pestering gets one from Tom. He then proceeds to run down the hall and show everyone who laughs behind Tom's back about the "fat pig" that he is currently dating. Throughout the rest of the play, Carter tries to convince Tom that he should “stick to his own kind.”