The buttoned-up Dr. Oscar von Shtein bounds into the room to deliver a FRED Talk on the classics. His cards are set, his water is in place, his projections are in the toilet: It seems they’ve been hijacked by a mysterious force called Puru, which soon we learn is a guru of poo. Writer-actor Shawn Shafner gleefully toggles between von Shtein and the Puru, whose mission is to communicate the surprisingly fascinating physical and cultural history of defecation and link it to such modern ills as body shaming. Shafner is building a mini-oeuvre on this subject—his musical, Eat $h*t: How Our Waste Can Save the World, played the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012—and his main point is that because everybody poops, our fecal attitude is a ecological disaster. He wants a global movement and, given his natural charm and bottomless capacity for scatological puns, he might just get one. But the end of this show pushes far too hard. Need we really rise, clap and sing “I’m a pooper” in unison? That feels like a load of crap in a show that is otherwise good at making us face our shit.—Leonard Jacobs
Click here for full Time Out New York coverage of the 2015 New York International Fringe Festival.