Playwright John Cariani calls Love/Sick, now playing at Olympia Little Theatre, an unromantic comedy.
“In the play, you’ll meet a bunch of what I call desperate optimists — people who believe in love but are terrified that it won’t last,” Cariani said in a 2013 interview (watch it on YouTube here) with The Public Theatre of Lewiston, Maine, then producing the show.
The show, a series of nine vignettes about love and relationships, adds fantastical details to relatable situations, said Kathryn Dorgan, who’s directing the OLT production.
“The situations are quirky and extraordinary for the most part, but they are all things that resonate with people,” she said. “The cast and I have had a number of conversations about the show, saying things like ‘Hasn’t everyone had this happen to them?’ ‘Isn’t everybody just about this happy?’ ”
The show was a natural choice for Dorgan, who has twice directed Cariani’s Almost Maine, another set of short plays that explores life and love.
Though she’s clearly a fan of that show, Dorgan hadn’t heard about Love/Sick until she met Cariani, a Tony-nominated actor best known for playing forensic expert Julian Beck in NBC’s Law & Order.
“I had an opportunity to … a day with John Cariani,” she said. “In 2022, he was speaking at the Washington State Thespian Festival and so was I. … That was a treat. We were chatting about his shows, and he told me about Love/Sick. He said it was a darker cousin to Almost Maine.”
She was interested and pitched the show to Theater Artists Olympia, which had planned to produce it before losing its mall theater space in 2024.
The show finally opened Friday, April 24 — coincidentally, the same day TAO opened the first show at its new downtown theater.
Though the show might be “unromantic,” Dorgan herself isn’t. She’s excited that her cast includes three married couples, all playing married couples: Anne and Alex Tracy, Derek Rutter and Edie Campbell, and Karen Longo and Rob Duran.
Also in the cast: Kaiah Costa, Douglas Mitchell, Jake McCown, Chris Stanley, Doug Zhang, Amanda Nixon, Tom Sanders, Jackie Scolaro, Christine Goode and Andrea Weston-Smart.
The production features original music composed and performed by multi-instrumentalist Jay Spivak, who’ll be singing and playing guitar and harmonica. Spivak was one of Dorgan’s students when she taught theater at Olympia High School.
Photos by Shanna Paxton Photography
WHAT
Love/Sick
WHEN
7:25 p.m. April 24 and 25 and May 1, 2 and 7-9,
and 1:55 p.m. April 26 and May 3 and 10
WHERE
Olympia Little Theatre, 202 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia
TICKETS
$10-$16
LEARN MORE
https://olympialittletheatre.org