The theatre world can be so rabidly insular that it borders on the cult-like. Depending on your level of initiation, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s pitch-perfect satire Theater Camp will either trigger mortifying flashbacks of vocal exercises and gender-reversed Shakespeare productions, or play like a psychoanalyst’s field study in hysteria. Its script arrives courtesy of a quartet of longtime friends and collaborators: The Bear actor Gordon, filmmaker Lieberman, Dear Evan Hansen’s Ben Platt, plus Platt’s fiancé and fellow Dear Evan Hansen star Noah Galvin. It’s like we’ve been invited into their shared reminiscence.
Platt and Gordon play a pair of camp counsellors, Amos and Rebecca-Diane, at the “AdirondACTS” camp in the Adirondacks, in New York State (it’s true, theatre people love puns). Their very raison d’être as the shapers of future Broadway talent comes under threat when “AdirondACTS” founder and head, Joan (Amy Sedaris), falls into a coma following a strobe lighting incident at a high school production, in what’s termed “the first Bye Bye Birdie-related injury in the history of Passaic County”.
