Written by Alina Mae Wilson• May 12, 2019• 4:05 pm• fullerton, Review, Stagestheatre, Theater, Uncategorized

One Slight Hitch @ STAGEStheatre – Review

Written by Alina Mae Wilson

STAGEStheatre is putting on a play by Lewis Black called One Slight Hitch, and I saw it. What started out as a boring show about the preparation of a wedding ended as a boring show ending with an unsatisfactory wedding. The jokes are not funny. The characters are not likable. In fact, they are rather loathsome and the conflict is uninteresting and nonsensical.

STORY:

A woman’s ex shows up uninvited on the day of her wedding. Her family alternates between desperately attempting to keep them apart and taking sadistic pleasure in any potential ensuing chaos (different characters respond differently to the drama). Will she and her fiancé get married? Will she get back with her ex? Will her mother discover the ex is in the house and have a conniption fit? These are the pressing questions in need of answering before the show is done.

The dialogue itself was uninteresting because of the way it is delivered. With all the shouting the characters do, it was hard to decide whether the acting was awful or the lines were intentionally bad. Having heard several people insist this is “Lewis Black Humor,” I believe it is the script itself.

Regardless, shouting the whole time didn’t make the play funnier.

The characters are absolutely detestable. Given the sheer joy they seem to get at the thought of the family matriarch suffering, it is hard to take any displays of concern as sincere. I cannot imagine any of them as sympathetic human beings. The ex-boyfriend is creepy and disturbing, which could be amusing but isn’t. This is mostly due to the fact that the problem of his presence should be a relatively easy fix, but, for increasingly minute reasons, he stays. Without giving too much away, the conflict itself does not make sense because of how simple the problem is.

Excessive shouting, detestable characters, boring plot — there are so many other things you could do with your time.