“By Committee” isn’t just a name for a theatre company, it’s how the whole production of Playing With Matches worked.

The play, conceived by Tim Condon, Paul Merrifield and Sandy Ross, went through more than twenty-five revisions, based in part on Paul’s “black binder” containing jokes and premises. Contributing to the large number of revisions, Sandy says, was the fact that “we’re rewriters.” Even that wasn’t the final version: Paul explains that “from rehearsals on we made this to be a collaborative process, so we gave the actors room to play around with a little improv and a lot of that stuff made it into the show.”

Darren Schmidt, who plays the romantic (?) lead, “wanted to break into community theatre after doing a lot of stuff at UWO” and saw a listing posted for “politically incorrect comedy, irreverent… I was just like ‘this is what I want, this is what I want.’” Now that the character actor has played a leading role, Sandy jokes that a role in a fall production of Hamlet “will be a letdown after our play”—although Darren is quick to point out that that’s only because “it’s not going to be the same without the Cheetos.”

Another member of the cast in a new position is Jacqui Vandale, a long-time Fringe Festival Trouper and volunteer who’s making her stage debut. Tim explains that at a public reading earlier in the year, stage manager “Jacqui read so well I said, ‘hey, do you want to audition?’ And then I had to cast her because she was just right for Claire.”

Tim credits the show’s website (put together by Sandy) and promo video, which was viewed over 100 times in the week leading up to this interview, with generating some of the early notice the show received from Fringe audiences, but admits “we don’t know” what effect their advance promotion has had overall. Although talking about the rehearsal process, Darren may have summed it up best: “Whatever the heck you just did, do that again. Sticking a Cheeto up your nose? Okay!”

Playing With Matches has three more scheduled performances at the Spriet Family Theatre in Covent Garden Market.