“Safe and Sorry: Play about pickup culture is disturbing, funny and utterly intriguing”
— NOW Magazine by Debbie Fein-Goldbach
“Safe and Sorry is a Funny, Frightening Examination of Dating and Pick-up Artists”
— BROADWAY WORLD by Isabella Perrone
Read full BROADWAY WORLD review
“Does your stomach turn at the mere mention of PUA culture? Mine too.”
— Istvan Dugalin
Read full ISTVAN DUGALIN review
“Pick-up artistry meets consent culture in the hilarious, disturbing, eye-opening Safe and Sorry”
— LIFE WITH MORE COWBELL by Cate McKim
Read full LIFE WITH MORE COWBELL review
“It’s a surreal descent into the dark, nebulous online communities surrounding pickup artistry, and manages moments of frightening hilarity and quiet reflection.”
— MOONEY ON THEATRE by Isabella O’Brien
Five Questions with Safe and Sorry
By Yizhou Zhang
“Treading the line between humor and the grotesque, Safe and Sorry is a comedy with a visceral punch scrutinizing pick-up artistry and masculinity in the age of social media. I sat down with Safe and Sorry’s co-creator and performer, Lauren Gillis to chat about contemporary dating, the manosphere, and “mindful” pick-up artistry.
SW:What compelled you to create Safe & Sorry?
LG: The unbearable awkwardness of being alive, and trying to position oneself as a sexual being in this world that increasingly seems to flit between a raging dumpster fire and a sexless void. Is it a comedy? Is it a horror? Is it a serious reckoning with what we should do about contemporary dating? Yes.”
“Safe and Sorry is the latest work from Lester Trips (Theatre). This production examines the challenges of a well-intentioned men’s dating coach under scrutiny, combining physical theatre with visceral horror to create uneasy comedy.
Lester Trips’ Artistic Producer and Safe and Sorry Director, Chelsea Dab Hilke took time to answer my 5 Questions… to share more about their latest show premiering at Summerworks this month.”
Two old friends, two new plays with links to internet culture at SummerWorks
By Karen Fricker Theatre CriticTues., Aug. 6, 2019
“Both shows are certainly connected to internet culture: Safe and Sorry comes out of Gillis’s observation that pickup culture, after a moment of high public profile in the early 2000s, didn’t go away: there are ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of guys out there now building up content as pickup instructors. ‘By definition they have some sort of platform … they go do their thing in a conference room and they talk to 40 guys, or 20 guys or 200 guys, and now they all have YouTube channels as well,’ Gillis explains.”
photos by Andrew Williamson