LIE CLUB is one of the most absorbing evenings in the theatre I've spent in ages. I was lucky to catch the final performance of this mind-blowing existential conundrum on Wednesday, Dec. 11th at Studio 3R on St. Mark's Place in the East Village, which was time well spent.
An exhilarating, if not downright dizzying, two person character-driven dark drama all about the games people play and the lies we tell each other day after day after day, the play conveys a sense of crazy forward motion and jump-cut reversals of fortune in the raveling and unraveling of lies told and exposed at Liars Anonymous—a dramatic conceit of an actual therapy center in London. The play at once signifies Progress in stripping back all the layers of the human onion in revealing the Truth that Lies Beneath, and then almost immediately doubles down with yet another Lie—resulting in laughs a'plenty herein—as well as a short sharp gasp of audience surprise at every hair pin turn.
As an audience member, the experience of watching this play was like being strapped into a pleasurable thrill ride but also like being held captive on a careening out of control stagecoach to hell.
It's a disorienting experience which by the play's end, you feel as if you have actually BEEN SOMEWHERE (Heaven's Gate—or the Ninth Circle—you take your pick).
Every time the collective audience seems to be lifted into the blue empyrean with a character's philosophical peroration on this sad human amalgam, and how through the Power of Love we must all rise above the deceitful lies abounding that help self-perpetuate le condition humane tragique, the dramatic rug is rudely jerked out from under us—a reversal of circumstances/fortune which occurs over and over again during the play, as yet another lie is uttered onstage that negates the previous stab at the character in question's "truth-telling."
In that, the play might well have been titled Chinese Boxes—or better yet, False Bottoms (pace the original title of Wyndham Lewis’s masterpiece of a novel The Revenge for Love).
What could have been a mind-numbing exercise in "No Exit"-type existential hokum is totally redeemed by some of the best and freshest stage acting I've ever witnessed by Murmuration Studios' Rachel De Fontes (the co-author of the play, whose character of a lecturer at Liar's Anonymous balances poised elegance on a knife edge with a wicked killer's instinct), and Peter Jeffries (the other co-author, a Scottish actor with preternatural boyish charm and an open, and winning personality, who struggles throughout with Rachel's devilish teasing).
This pair can do it all. They can stop on a dramatic dime, fly through the air with the greatest of ease, deliver howlers and shift gears from farce to tragedy in a millisecond. They had total command of a young East Village audience that cheered them on and loved every minute of this play. Both actors exude a natural honesty and downright sexiness of persona I found extremely engaging. You kind of both fall in love with these two, and alternately, are repulsed by them, as they spider-like spin their glib patter—mainly comedic, but with a through-line that occasionally veers into shock/horror territory. They are that good.
I thoroughly recommend this show, which was a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and which has been touring internationally with great success.
Here's looking forward to further mind-blowing collaborations from Rachel De Fontes, Peter Jeffries, and Murmuration Studios.