Aubrey Wang reviews One Too Many by LLOTS Productions at White Wall Studio, Montreal Fringe 2026. Seven zoomers in thrifted Y2K separates spend forty minutes trying to hold together miscarriage, abortion, police misconduct, infidelity, and one on-stage stabbing with an ice pick.
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It was a hot Thursday afternoon and seven zoomers in thrifted Y2K separates were about to make me watch them do miscarriage, abortion, police misconduct, infidelity, and one on-stage ice-pick stabbing in forty minutes.
There is a specific pleasure to watching seven people have a wonderful, in-jokey, private good time on a sunlit stage, and LLOTS have made an inside joke you want to be inside of.
The audience is outside — but the joke, from the inside, seems like a good time, and the ensemble energy is real. It was lowkey kind of iconic.
I keep trying to find a reference for the vibe and the closest I can get is: John Waters, if John Waters had been made socially stunted by the pandemic instead of by growing up gay in 1950s Baltimore.
The impulse toward camp, toward lo-fi, toward grotesque commitment, all there. Somehow the descendants of the Dreamlanders are these seven girls in Aritzia baby tees making bad decisions in a studio on Avenue Laval. History is a spiral.
Everyone speaks like they've just taken an edible. Bugged-out, affectless, deadpan, as if line readings were being given from inside a very small, very cold refrigerator. Call it the A24 Sad Girl register, or the Ottessa Moshfegh Extended Universe.
A mildly funny line and a devastating one both receive the same I'm sorry, did you just. Everyone is reacting to each other like a drag queen. Every look is a face-crack. Every response is a gag.
Everyone is in like Depop clothes. Each performer is in the exact outfit they would have worn to the show as an audience member. A sophisticated dramaturgical choice about the collapse of the barrier between performer and audience in an era of parasocial content.
The blocking is stunning. Every performer occupies one square meter tile of the stage and moves to the next one exclusively via the Sims teleport-walk. It's giving Habbo Hotel. It's giving Second Life. It's giving Roblox. It's giving Animal Crossing villager pathing. It's giving the NPCs at the edge of a Skyrim quest.
You can see every self-tape each of them has ever submitted for the Netflix teen show they didn't book, every callback for the mumblecore pilot that got cancelled, every three-line co-star role on The Recruit season 2, every commercial audition for a mental health app.
Then they'd collected these tapes together in one rehearsal room. And it shouldn't be funny, but it was. Idk why.
Jake is like quirked out. Quirked up white boy busting it down sexual style. His monologue about home births and holding his girlfriend's hair while she throws up is funny. Jake has whatever it is that Kieran Culkin has, that quality about small unstable men who are extremely watchable. Jake is going to be someone's Roman Empire in three years. Cast Jake. Cast this man in something.
You had to be there, you sort of had to have grown up with these people.
What happens, more or less, is this: a couple fights about whether to have a baby; the man is thrown out; on a rooftop he meets a woman who has, we learn, shot a suspect in the line of duty and is now, herself, in some form of psychic freefall; someone else is offered a cigarette; someone else, elsewhere, prays for a girl she has just met and offers to connect her with a friend at the hospital who can help with an abortion; a group of college friends drinks champagne, or refuses to; a housewarming party collapses when it emerges that everyone in the room has been impregnated by the same man, Jake, the quirked-up white boy, who at the play's climax is set upon with an ice pick from someone's Kate Spade purse.
Reader, I laughed.
That is not a story. That is a feed. The ice-pick ending kinda just happens like an autoplay to the next video.
One Too Many is the purest example I have seen, in Montréal, or anywhere, of a form that did not exist five years ago: the play made by people whose primary aesthetic training is the For You Page. The affectless-effortful delivery, the 9:16 blocking, the parasocial ensemble, dressed for each other. The absolute conviction that a private joke, performed with total commitment, becomes public art.
And you know what? It does. Sometimes. Enough of the time. Enough that I walked out with laugh lines on my face at 4pm on a hot Thursday and thought: fine. Fine, girls. You win this round. Xoxo.
Reviewed by Aubrey Wang
Running time 40 min
Rating 12+
Content warnings Mention of miscarriage, abortion and police misconduct. Depiction of infidelity, alcohol usage, act of physical mutilation and mature language. Some images are depicted, the play doesn't endorse any gore.
Instagram @llotsproductions
Dates 16–20 June 2026
Venue White Wall Studio
4532 avenue Laval, Plateau, Montréal
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