Save it For the Stage: TV Shows and Movies about THEATRE
I’m not like other girls. I hate drama…unless it’s Eugene O'Neill.
I’m not like other girls. I hate drama…unless it’s Eugene O’Neill. See what I did there? Welcome to the magic of THE THEATRE. You are legally required to say it in a loud, pompous voice that simply implies the “re” spelling whenever you talk about theater.
I grew up absolutely loving theater. I was instantly drawn to it. Seeing a play was my favorite field trip in school. Even though I was super shy as an elementary school student, I still wanted speaking lines and solos. It never occurred to me that that was scary! I was an eight-year-old who fully compartmentalized the self in real life vs. the self onstage. Real Stephanie? So scared to talk to anyone that I usually wound up crying. Stage Stephanie? FULL ON SOLILOQUIZING, HONEY.
I briefly detoured from THE STAGE to be a competitor in martial arts ( we don’t have time to go into it, but, yes, I’m a black belt), but I injured myself right around the time I landed a lead role in a play that was a knockoff of The Addams Family called Meet the Creeps. When the cast list came out and my name was listed next to “Tarantula Creeps”, I didn’t even think about whether or not it was the lead. Someone (jealously) pointed out that I had the most lines in the play. So? I didn’t care about the amount of lines. I was just happy to be there! And for some reason, I really wanted to be there. It was almost an instinct, a compulsion. I never wondered “am I good” or thought “I want to be a star!”. I just wanted to be involved in anything theatrical. After opening night of the Creeps show, I felt amazing and I remember telling my parents that I felt way better performing than I did getting the shit kicked out of me by black belts. Thus the path to the stage was cemented for eternity!
Because it was always something I *just did*, I never thought that I wouldn’t do it. I considered everything a part of theater, too, from standup comedy to writing humor pieces. To me, it all fed into the same thing: making something entertaining and relatable for audiences - which was definitely annoying to many comics I spoke to about how the eNtiRe pErFoRmAnCe matters, not just the jokes. Lo siento, pero I really believe that! I’m here to give the audience a SHOW, dammit. Everything they can see, feel, hear, smell counts!
In the past few years in standup comedy, I noticed a trend among young comedians, typically female, to invoke our theatre teachers and classes of old. I’m definitely a part of this trend! My first solo show, Miss Business, was supposed a parody of a “workshop” meant to teach the audience how to make it in show business, taught by someone who hasn’t yet made it. I co-wrote and performed a show with my theater-loving friend called Hollis and Vivian’s Masterclass where we played drama teachers and the audience was our class. During the class we find out that one of us got a role in a community theater production and the other did not. Drama! Comedy! I still love that show. There’s been a sort of caricature a lot of comedians were doing onstage pre-pandemic of someone very entitled and very sure of themselves as a performer, while consistently making jabs at the weird and minor roles they got cast in while in high school theater.
I don’t know where this came from exactly, but I have to admit that I think all of it is funny. I really do! There’s just something about taking the piss out of theater that is so much fun. I also think a lot of our generation of comedians went to college since it was the expectation for so many of us and, since so many of us are weirdos who want attention, we turned to theater. You can do so many things with a theater degree and if you already have stage presence, why not try comedy?
Theater is so easy to lampoon because it takes itself SO seriously despite wearing feathers and tights. It is extra easy to lampoon when that intensity is directed to “small time” theater like a high school, community theater, or college - and I love all of it. Seriously! I love every Saturday Night Live sketch that has that drama troupe delivering “serious” lessons. My all-time favorite sketch is “The Audition” from Mr. Show. I adore Toast of London and not just because I have a crush on Matt Berry, but because it shows how the dreams and delusions of a theater actor never die. I love theater so much and it’s fun to roast the things we love.
So here are my favorite things that make fun of theater particularly well:
Waiting for Guffman is the OG community theater mockumentary. As someone who did community and high school theater as a teen, this felt SO real. I was nice in a local production of Fiddler on the Roof where the couple playing Tevye and Golde were a real married couple who got married ON THAT STAGE years prior. Sometimes our rehearsals felt like we were getting a peak behind the curtains of their marriage, that we were voyeurs to their stage. The guy playing Tevye would constantly interrupt rehearsals to ask “to try a funny bit” something none of the rest of us would have been allowed to do without the angry old woman directing us shouting something like “do you think you can do THAT on Broadway?!” which only cemented that he was the king of this castle. That also reminded me a lot of Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara’s characters in Waiting for Guffman. They were the royal couple of that community theater, big fish in a goofy little pond, and they reveled in their place at the top. While these characters - and people like them - are respected and revered in their communities, you know that if they went elsewhere it wouldn’t be so easy and that that might be why they stay auditioning for unpaid performances of musicals in suburban community centers. Another fun sidenote about this movie: at a cast party once after a high school play, a bunch of us put Waiting for Guffman on and one kid basically hulked out because he didn’t get why this was funny. He was so mad that he stormed out of the room. That’s a lot of anger to have post-Once Upon a Mattress.
I think that Steve Coogan in Hamlet 2 is an underrated gem. He plays a failed actor and alcoholic who becomes an acting teacher at a Tucson high school tasked with selling tickets to their failing theater program. He does this by writing an original “sequel” to Hamlet which inexplicably involves time travel, musical numbers, and Jesus as a character. They sell tickets because it is controversial and wind up getting to perform the show on Broadway (I know that’s like - what? how? Just go with it). I mostly remember this movie because of its last lines when the kids get to New York and look around in awe. Steve Coogan tells one of them, “you're going to have a magical life. Because no matter where you go, it'll always be better than Tucson.”
Barry is a drama about a hitman for hire who takes an acting class and falls in love with it. He’s not that good at acting, but he winds up sort of treating this like therapy to work through his issues (which is scary!) in his acting class taught by Henry Winkler’s old tired actor character. The class feels SO real to me as do the actors in the class. The woman who becomes Barry’s love interest feels incredibly real. She is a SERIOUS actress who is very ambitious, very sensitive, VERY self-obsessed and willing to do whatever she thinks she needs to do to be taken seriously as an actress. This incredible two-minute monologue she delivers in the middle of a scene study with Barry says it all. It completely encapsulates the thing about actors that is so simultaneously off-putting and endearing. She starts talking about herself without warning or prompting while they are in the middle of practicing their lines and she manages to work herself up to the point of tears and Barry just stands there like…um…but this is sort of what acting school actors are like. Sure, call them delusional or egocentric, but they are concerned about themselves because they have to be. They are the cheerleaders for their own careers. They constantly face rejection and have to walk into yet another audition believing that this will be IT. They know that they are only as good at their last show. When the curtain closes or when the project wraps, they have to search for their next paycheck. They are so tapped into their own emotions, because they have to emulate them so often, that they can easily crack - even by the story of their own struggle coming out of their own god damned mouths. Like I said, off-putting, but also endearing. I admire the gumption. I admire Sally:
The 40 Year Old Version is a newer film on Netflix that you can see right now. You should. Go see it right now! It’s written, produced, and directed by Radha Blank who also stars as a forty-year-old Black playwright and teacher who is struggling to get her new work up. She wants to do things HER way, but the theatre elites in NYC (rich whites) want her to make “diverse” work that caters to their audiences. She dabbles in spoken word and rapping to get her creative juices flowing and that gives her the attitude revival that she needs to challenge the theater that is butchering her play about gentrification. As a Latina writer, this felt SO relatable. I’ve had my work scrutinized for both being “too much for latins” (that was literally said to me in a written rejection from a theater that wanted diverse work) and not Latinx enough. Anyone outside of the status quo has faced this. We just want to write our stories, but the establishment wants it to be OUR STORIES for THEIR AUDIENCES. That means that white-washed trauma porn and stereotypes get served up again and again while things that many of us can relate to get ignored. Can’t we also tell a story that feels authentic to us and let the audience that would like that come see it? This is the kind of stuff this movie deals with and it’s GREAT.
Finally, the older generations had Fame, but I? Had Camp. Camp is a CAMPY movie about a musical theatre camp, complete with teenagers’ renditions of musical numbers. Camp Ovation welcomes a variety of outsiders together for a summer of exploration, growth, and a ton of theater jokes. It is worth the watch for a very young Anna Kendrick’s portrayal of a twisted young girl who will do ANYTHING to go from understudy to star. I mean holy shit is she good at this part. She’s scary good at this part. The movie is fully worth watching to see how scary the young Miss Kendrick can actually be.
Please enjoy and shiver through tweenaged Anna Kendrick’s terrifyingly good rendition of “Ladies Who Lunch” from Company. Oh, I’ll drink to that.
I was inspired to talk about theater because the college I went to, North Park University, decided to end their theater major program. Cutting arts education is what villains do, but I guess the administration didn’t know that because they didn’t see any of the campus’ plays. That being said, theater is scrappy. Theater is small and often down-on-its-luck, but it survives. It has survived for thousands of years around the world. TheatRE remains optimistic in the face of death. It has to be. The show must always go on. So, to my alma mater, take a bow. I’m still holding out hope for an encore, but know that you’ve had a great run.
Coming soon: my podcast I Heard This Thing.
Reading: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Watching: I just watched Ted Lasso. It ended up being really sweet! I also watched ALL of The Fast & the Furious Films and they absolutely rocked. Family.