Death is Bullshit! is, quite simply, a quick little tale of how a retarded asshole slacker meets his demise. Now don't get mad at me (yet) for spoilers, this is covered right in the synopsis of the play.
The play opens with the lead character telling stand-up in the afterlife. For those who don't know, it's a little something called framing: the website that does sarcastic Enterprise reviews highlights the episodes that use this device, it's worth reading the bits on all of them:
framing episodes should be saved for something really special. In both of these cases, it wasn't necessary, and the fact that it was implemented was clearly to falsely jack up the suspense because the episodes couldn't hold its own.
That sort of covers this play, as you're waiting to see how the lead character, Skye ("they call me 'Skype' because I'm always on call") bites it. In the synopsis he's described as a lawyer, it's clear from the play that he has certainly not passed the bar, so we'll call him a legal secretary to be kind. He's a fan of 80s wrestling, smoking pot, and comedy. Unfortunately not only does he not possess any comedic talents, or any legal talents, he's also a horrible person socially as well. He plays games where he imagines having sex with random passengers on the bus, apparently doesn't notice when he's talking about people right in front of them (okay, I'll disgress on here in possibly the longest parenthetical aside in history: at one point Skye is on the bus with a girl who he had just finished spending an hour talking to earlier in the day, and cajoled into having him be an attendee at a benefit, and he decides to do a stand up routine about "the game" with her on the bus while she's right there and then when she confronts him he doesn't know who she is and seemed surprised that she could hear him, which really from any sort of storytelling point of view made no sense at all since we saw this same trick being used to apparently highlight his stand-up bits he was telling after he died, which as we all know he did right from the start), and has no qualms hitting on a girl as she's in distress and he's talking with her in a business setting.
Skye's sister (twin, though that's not particularly important) Beth is a real honest-to-God lawyer, though she seems to have gotten her own law firm or maybe taken over her fathers while in her late 20s? (The firm is "O'Brien-O'Brien-O'Brien") She's also in a bizarre sexual relationship (which may or may not be love?) with Trent, who is Skye's roommate and best friend. Skye's idiocy is on full display as he can't figure out why his sister is always over visiting and then sleeping on Trent's floor rather than in her brother's room. At later points of the play, even while they are engaged in what I guess is supposed to be hilariously kinky sex but is uncomfortably difficult to follow along even before Trent's character gets full-frontal on us (and oh long-time readers will be wondering, the women don't show so much as inner thigh here), Skye can't figure out what's going on around him. He falls on his nonexistent comedy to think they're doing some weird prank on each other, or maybe him.
Much of the relatively successful...not so much funny, but interesting to watch...aspects of the play are that Trent apparently is the founder of a company making crappy products advertised during infomercials (for those wondering about this review's URL). Beth and Trent do their own advertisements, and the parody of the style of these ads works well and again is at least interesting to watch. They probably should have tried to stick a couple more in, even if only the last one had any connection to the story.
The least successful parts all come featuring...I forget what the play called her, so I'll call her Alison. If you know what her character's name was, I suggest you forget that fact and just call her Alison in your head too. She's a prospective client for the law firm, but Beth (and all other lawyers in town) realize she's a toxic client not worth their time: her father was driving drunk without insurance and struck another vehicle killing the parents of the young family contained within. The family is suing Alison's dad, who must be related to Ricky Richardson since he's not in jail. Alison wants Beth to take the case, and Beth wants Skye to do his job, which is apparently be such an unprofessional ass that the client leaves. I'm not entirely sure this is a successful business strategy in the age of the internet, which presumably this play takes place in seeing how they reference smoking laws, where disgruntled clients can post a Google review and even the clients Beth wants may come across the horribly unprofessional guy passing himself off as a manager and then being a tool. Alison's character exists here only to push the plot forward, she's played much more straight and demure and not over-the-top until the end so she always stands out as not fitting in. She's apparently cool with Skye doing "comedy" at a benefit her family held to raise money for the victims of her father, even when this comedy was all about DVDA, seeing how even after that and the bus incident she still came back to his place. As the play reaches its end, Alison finally goes over the top, robbing Trent and Skye and then stabbing Skye for being a prick, getting into a fight with Beth, and then ultimately setting in motion the, oh, spoiler alert everybody, scroll down to the next bold to avoid...
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...stabbing of every single character (herself included), causing them all to die and be reunited (to everybody's delight but Alison's) in Skye's afterlife of endless crowds interested in standup comedy.
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okay you can all tune back in now.
Death is Bullshit is a series of fairly disjointed bits requiring us to find the horrible lead character either likable enough to handle despite his flaws, or horrible enough we want to see him fail. The actor is relatively likable Scott Malone but his delivery of Skye is so cavalier that he can't force you into one of the two required categories for the play to succeed. Too many segments seem to involve the writer Chris Cook to showcase his acting talents as Trent by having Trent like to pretend to be various weird celebrities being interviewed by Skye's Jimmy Kimmel (flip a coin on which one is less deserving of a big US network talk show). The play tries very hard to be zany, but it just has too many scenes either painful to watch or not interesting enough to sustain.
Final word: There are probably stand-up shows at this year's fringe with a less engaging plot and less funny jokes, but that doesn't necessarily mean you should sit in the hot C103 for this plotted attempt at theatre sports.
