Allison Amirault's Fringe offering, A Bar Scene, plays like an extended SNL sketch during which two men and two women (late-twenties/early thirty somethings) over drinks in a "meat market" play kickball with the hoary, age-old question: What is love? We scarcely know at A Bar Scene's conclusion. Why? This swift comedy of Eros sallies forth on the playwright's reliance on archtypes as characters in a bar: a lust and found department in which to mine love's meaning(s) in lieu of real distinctive, idiosyncratic people plumbing their souls for understanding love in a locale conducive for such. The men are bar-yard oinkers: one amiable, the other a hardened chauvinist. The women portrayed include one game for anything and anyone and her companion, a shrill kvetcher, bitter after a contentious breakup. As such the characters, caught in various combos with each other, hurl about and whipsaw gender banalities and stereotypical misunderstandings, or engage in speed-dating games, proving to the amusement of the audience last night, that love is blind. Also daft and dumb. The actors play their roles with brio, not so much revealing anything we don't already know but nevertheless, reminding us of the words of that celebrated and pre-eminient philosopher of priapism, Sir Mick Jagger: You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need. In this case, a relatively good laugh.
A Bar Scene will be running in the Khyber Arts Centre 1 Saturday September 1 at 3:30 and 8:30, Sunday September 2at 6:45, Monday September 3 at 4:30, Wednesday September 5 at 8:00, Thursday September 6 at 6:15, Friday September 7 at 7:15, Saturday 8 at 6:45 and Sunday September 9 at 7:15 $5.00
