Molly Gordon Proves She’s a Comedy Star In ‘Theater Camp’

If you think that Molly Gordon is the break-out star of 2023 because of her performance as Claire in The Bear, you’re wrong… but only because Molly Gordon is the break-out star of 2023 because of her performance as Rebecca-Diane in Theater Camp.

Arguably the best comedy of the year, Theater Camp opened in theaters via Searchlight in July and was released on streaming on Hulu and digital platforms today. It’s Christopher Guest meets Wet Hot American Summer: an absurd mockumentary about a performance camp for theater kids in upstate New York. Gordon not only stars in the film as a crystal-loving music theory teacher, she also co-wrote the film with her musical theater pals—Nick Lieberman, Ben Platt, and Noah Galvin—and she co-directed with Lieberman. The result is a very funny, exceedingly self-aware evisceration of former “theater kids.” It will hit particularly hard for anyone who spent the majority of their high school experience in the drama room.

Gordon and Platt star as heightened, less-successful versions of themselves: Childhood best friends Rebecca-Diane and Amos. They’re both obsessed with musical theater and aspire to someday perform on Broadway, but teach at their former camp as a day job in the meantime. (Gordon and Platt actually are childhood besties, and even formed a theater troupe as kids that performed for retirement homes.) While Amos is ruthless with the kids—offering cutting remarks that would devastate professionals, much less 12-year-olds—Rebecca-Diane is a more gentle presence. She teaches music theory, but she also dabbles in communicating with the dead as a medium. But it’s clear she’s more invested in the spiritual aesthetic than in actually talking to ghosts. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Gordon croaks “Troy, it’s your mom,” in a half-hearted E.T. voice, after the camp director’s frat bro son (American Vandal‘s Jimmy Tatro) asks to speak to his comatose mother.

Everyone in the Theater Camp cast brings their A-game for this script full of razor-sharp one-liners, which clearly benefitted from having all four writers on set for improv and punch-ups. But Gordon, especially, shines through. She prances into her classroom playing a complicated tune on the recorder, then orders the kids to “sing that back to me.” She over-enunciates bizarre vocal warm-ups about “Al Gore by the old cheese store” and “Wolf Blitzer” who “has a blister on his upper lip.” She stares a small child in the face and says, with no hint of breaking, “You are president William Howard Taft.” And she falls to her knees sobbing, snot running down her face, as she begs a tween to “Get off the stick.” (She’s referring to a tear stick, a menthol-infused wax used to help cry on command, which she calls “doping for actors.”)

Time and time again, Gordon surprised deep, guttural laughter from me. (Much like the “guttural ‘daddy'” she suggests for the camp’s original musical.) But crucially, she also nails the dramatic scenes. Inevitably, Rebecca-Diane and Amos’s friendship blows up after Rebecca-Diane reveals she’s been offered a job as a featured soloist on a Cole Porter-themed cruise. Rebecca-Diane admits she feels Amos is holding back her career, because though he insists he’s an aspiring performer, he doesn’t appear to actually want to his camp job. When Rebecca-Diane reveals she does, actually, want to be a performer, he takes the news as a betrayal. The authentic way Platt and Gordon play off each other for this pivotal fight scene appears effortless, though it’s surely not. Some how, Gordon manages to make the phrase, “Cole Porter on the Waves” sound like a bombshell revelation. Now that’s what I call talent.

Though The Bear is billed as a comedy, Gordon didn’t get much of a chance to flex her funny bone as Jeremy Allen White’s new love interest. Booksmart fans may remember her as “Triple A,” and Shiva Baby fans may recall she was Rachel Sennott’s love interest. But Theater Camp is a lead role for Gordon that showcases her comedic talents not just as a performer, but as a writer and director, too. At the risk of inflating the ego of a theater kid, Theater Camp proves Molly Gordon is a bonafide comedy star.