Off Book: A New Mockumentary

Off Book is a half-hour mockumentary comedy about a suburban community theatre where the stakes are low, but everyone treats them like Broadway.

At the Old Stone Theatre Center for Community Performance, auditions feel political, casting feels personal, and adults willingly sacrifice their nights, weekends, relationships, and occasionally their physical safety for productions they are mostly not being paid to perform. Nobody has to be here. That’s what makes it insane.

The series follows Lauren Penski, a talented former theatre kid who came home for six months before moving to New York...and is still there five years later. When she’s passed over for the lead in Urinetown in favor of an actor-turned-influencer with 20,000 followers, Lauren is cast as her understudy, forcing her to spend the season watching someone else occupy the role she believes should have been hers.

Around her is an ensemble of people with ambitions wildly disproportionate to the resources available to them: Lauren’s longtime friend Emmett, an eternal ensemble player who unexpectedly lands the male lead; Chloe, who understands that being talented and being noticed are two very different things; Lenny, a director treating Urinetown as his unofficial audition to become Old Stone’s next Artistic Director; and a collection of performers, creatives, and volunteers who keep choosing to come back despite having absolutely no obligation to be there.

Told through a mockumentary lens, Off Book finds comedy in the enormous emotional importance people assign to objectively tiny stakes, without treating those emotions themselves as a joke. As casting politics, bruised ambition, showmances, artistic egos, and complicated friendships collide, the series asks what happens when the place you go to escape your real life becomes the place where you most desperately need to feel chosen.