Rachel Bowron, Jenny McKillop, Mhairi Berg, Oscar Derkx in Bright Lights, Blarney Productions at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

Bright Lights (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A weekly support group for people who’ve had encounters with aliens operates under an earnest multi-limbed mantra: “this is a safe place. We’re here for you. We believe you. Your truth matters….” But in its sassy heart Bright Lights, a springloaded 2016 comedy by Kat Sandler (The Party and The Candidate), has a question for you. If push comes to shove (as it so often does in the contemporary world), how would you prove you’re an actual human and not an alien?

Asking the question, as Bright Lights does so hilariously, is an invitation to absurdity. And the comedy and the cast of Luc Tellier’s crack Blarney production relish the theatrical challenge of ever-so-gradually upping the ante, in ways that never stop seeming like fine-grained realism.

Mhairi Berg in Bright Lights, a Blarney production. Photo by Ryan Parker.

A newcomer to the group, — a performance nicely pitched by Mhairi Berg — arrives in response to a poster to share her experience of alien abduction that ends up with her sleeping in a field beside her car with all her clothes on backwards. You know, a classic. But the encounter includes a discovery that rocks the group. And the real fun of the piece is the interplay of idiosyncratic personalities, nailed with great comic pizzaz by Tellier’s first-rate cast.

Rachel Bowron is grim Dave, the fiercest of the group, a veteran of “quadruple alien probing” (the mind boggles), on perpetual red alert armed to the teeth for the coming war. Jenny McKillop is the daffy, conciliatory, and extremely pregnant Laurel. Particularly amusing is Oscar Derkx as Wayne, the ex-child star and full-time narcissist who constantly quotes the now-defunct TV series Junior Law. (“so help me law” is his favourite oath). He’s particularly infatuated with his own  psychic abilities. There’s a very funny glibness about Ross, the leader of the group, in Braydon Dowler Coltman’s performance. And, as catalyzed by the newcomer’s reported experience, they slide into overlapping conversation, and the absurdist reaches of argument, with escalating speed under Tellier’s direction.

Who can you trust? Can you believe where you don’t trust? Logic gets invoked, and foiled, at every turn; does it even work with “reality”?. Questions like that get lobbed lightly through the air of Bright Lights. And it’s all fun.