Ryan Wants a Jimmy Award is a one-man spiral wrapped in a show tune, a love story dressed as a breakdown. Ryan, a gay, out-of-work, overtrained, under-booked tenor, sets his sights on the most gloriously illogical goal imaginable: winning a high school theatre award at thirty mumble years old. What unfolds is a deliriously funny and disarmingly honest collision of ambition, queerness, sex, loneliness, and the ever-elusive promise of “making it.”

With razor-sharp wit and zero self-preservation, the show skewers audition culture, situationships, and the myth of artistic arrival, while still aching, earnestly and stubbornly, for connection and meaning. It is camp, it is chaos, it is a little unhinged, and it knows it. Beneath the punchlines and belt notes is something tender and painfully recognizable: the fear that the dream might not happen, and the even scarier question of who you are if it doesn’t.