←Recommendations of PLEASE LAUGH

A brutally honest, unflinching look into the misogyny of show business, PLEASE LAUGH is a harrowing ride through what is either a Talk Show filmed in hell or just a very normal night with James Corden. I have never, in all my years seeing theater, witnessed the cognitive dissonance this play inspires in its audience when they are asked to clap for some of the most horrific punchlines imaginable and reflect on their own complicity in enabling men like the Host to continue their work. Excellent.

Many artists have explored the underlying tension behind the facade of Late-Night shows, but few have implicated the audience as directly as Sarah does in her brilliant play. This is a profoundly uncomfortable and provocative work that perverts the mechanical ritual of the talk show into something more damning and truthful. But even in its incisive takedown of the male-driven Hollywood apparatus, the play still manages to be very funny - eliciting as many laughs as uneasy silences.

Packed with very realistic late night speak and typical hierarchy shenanigans. Cringy and uncomfortable, but like a train wreck, impossible to look away! Single set, flashing prompt lights and a throne make the game of the show workable and potentially fun (though not really). Excellent read and this would be even more fun on stage.

This play is so horrifyingly extravagant, and is guaranteed to make any audience feel viscerally uncomfortable as they are immersed in the world of this late-night television studio. Leiber expertly infuses comedy into upsetting situations, touching on the way fame can control a person, misogyny in the entertainment industry, and how audiences become complicit (and even enabling). A fascinating read that will play beautifully onstage!

So funny and so uncomfortable. This parody of a late night show with a host who behaves badly and is indulged every step of the way will make you laugh and cringe. It's a great commentary on fame and the fame-adjacent, with a fantastic monologue about doing improv in college. I truly didn't know what was going to happen next from moment to moment as I feared for the women and tried to will Buddy to step up and step in. With engaging characters, a single set, and audience participation (but not in an uncomfortable way), this play is great.

A play committed to pure entertainment and engagement in the most sensational and deranged fashion. Absolutely steadfast in its mission of presenting a superbly heightened, yet overly familiar world of entertainment, making the audience a complicit participant in the mania of the story. Uncomfortable and gut-punching, and maybe one of the funniest treatises on the corruption of contemporary fame out there.

Hilarious! Scary! James Corden! A pop culture play that never feels #topical. Someone must stop these late-night psychos and Leiber just might be the person to do it. This play has a chaotic, unhinged, trickster energy. The funniest play I've read on this site by a wide margin.

The host, as with many such hosts i.r.l, has nothing funny to say himself, but his sheer audacity is horrifyingly hilarious (often a difficult line to toe, written masterfully here), and it drives everyone around him to similar extremes. Despite the host's gravity, the other characters are fully realized and genuinely funny. The more straightforward moments of hope and humor carry a lingering uneasiness with them; how long can it last? The journey the audience takes from standard interactions to game playing, to complicity, is fascinating and begs for a full production to see.

The best thing James Corden has ever been in, this is a really great talk show play