Philly Fringe 2025: Pier Players Theatre Company presents David Lee White’s Etiquette

Etiquette, a new play by David Lee White presented by Pier Players Theatre Company in this year’s Fringe, remembers that very specific time quite well. This funny and incisive world-premiere comedy/drama, directed by Charlotte Northeast, is running through September 14 at the Adrienne Theatre’s mainstage in Rittenhouse.

A spiraling crisis

The play is set over the course of a single night in the fall of 2021, backstage at a venerable theater company where, we learn, the longtime male creative head has recently been ousted for #MeToo-related reasons. The theater spent some time doing Zoom-based performances, but they’re now back in person, even if they’re all still nervous from everything that took place in 2020.

We’re introduced first to frazzled theater employees Keri (Julianne Kastner), Darius (Kate Brighter) and Jess (Chelsea Cylinder), as they deal with a spiraling crisis: the star of the play, veteran diva Lauren Ellis (Meghann Williams), has berated a male audience member (Benjamin Behrend) for using his cell phone in the theater, bringing that night’s performance to an early end. And the moment, almost immediately, has gone viral on social media.

But was the man’s device really a phone? Throughout the night, the entire controversy plays out on Facebook, as the reputation and future of the theater hang in the balance.

One character seems to think apologizing is the solution to every problem, while the others see an opportunity in the situation. But it’s clear that in those late-pandemic times, everyone’s been driven a little bit off-kilter—especially the people spending most of their time on social media.

Fighting to be back in a room together

The 90-minute play, at least in its first act, resembles a door-slamming farce at times, but it slows down a bit later on, especially when the three theater administrators are joined by Lauren, an older, seen-at-all showbiz veteran with some very different perspectives from her colleagues. The scene where she performatively destroys her Actors' Equity card is a highlight.

“The theater world got a little wacky back in 2021,” the playwright says in the show’s press release, and Pier Players successfully captures what that moment was like.

“Working on this play provides me with equal measures of panic-inducing recall mixed with the ability to see just how hard we were willing to fight to be back in a room together—making fiction come to life in the toughest of circumstances,” Northeast, the director, said in the release.

Pier Players Theatre Company is a newish local organization, in which several of the performers double as company leaders with additional behind-the-scenes roles: for Etiquette, Cylinder is the producer, Brighter the props designer, and Kastner the marketing director.

The same company was behind The Angry Grammarian, a musical based on local journalist Jeffrey Barg’s long-running column, which had a pair of acclaimed runs last year. White wrote the book for The Angry Grammarian, which ran first at Theatre Exile and later at Arden Theatre Company’s Arcadia Stage.

Etiquette is an enjoyable, very funny show that successfully captures that very specific moment in time.