Written by Amy Losi and directed by Laurie Rae Waugh, Stick To The Script is as meta as it gets. Comedic scenes follow a small cast as they rehearse for, and perform, a drama entitled The Missing Letter. From the first lines, the stage manager named Brad Pytt (not to be confused with Brad Pitt), played by Johnny Blaze Leavitt, gives introductory notes to the audience: silence your phones, know where the emergency exits are. These notes, of course, are relevant to both the in-play performance and the real performance. And as other characters galavant across the stage—amateur actors, inflated actresses—Charles Peters, the director played by J. Dolan Byrnes, lashes out in futile attempts to wrangle them, spitting the words, “Stick to the script!”
The play’s highest moments are easily its classic, slapstick skirmishes: a cis man reappearing on stage as a French maid, one-line zingers, and mondegreens. Some of these moments hit the right note (one character mistaking “Let’s get a move on” for “Let’s get a hard on”) and some of them don’t (one actress flashing a “No Kings” protest sign randomly in the middle of the performance). The playwright and main actress of The Missing Letter, played by Losi herself, doesn’t elicit laughs from the audience the first time she switches to a French accent, and then a Southern one. While it isn’t funny the second time either, surprisingly, by the third and fourth time, it is.
While the plot of The Missing Letter is, understandably, lost in the chaos of actors forgetting their lines, missing stage cues, overacting, underacting, and fumbling with erroneous props (a tray filled with condoms instead of cookies), the audience is still left wondering what, exactly, the play within the play was about—it would have been to the comedy’s credit to develop the meta-plot more. Instead, Losi gives airtime to a couple love stories—one between the director and playwright, and another between the stage manager and an actress whose gimmick is absence—which lend little to the story, and the comedy.
The criticism voiced by the director (“So many words, so little art”), may be an allusion to Losi’s own self-criticism, which is surely felt by all playwrights. One may also view it as a safety net, such that the real script’s wordiness and lack of substance, can be explained away.
ARTIUM: OMNI 