Buyer’s Remorse

by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low | 8/4/09 • This is another show that I stumbled into purely by random chance, and I winced when I opened the programme and saw that the play was by the author of Killer Smile — a show that I found well-constructed, but ultimately hollow and a bit tedious.

Not that there was all that much to this one, either, but I found its general aesthetic to be much more to my liking. Any satirical pretensions are understated: this is a pure farce, a comedy of situations. The plot tells of a hapless bystander who finds himself embroiled in an escalating, bureaucratic war between a pair of bumbling hit men, and the increasingly ludicrous plot twists that are piled onto one another. The cast is appealing, and though it never seems to go as far as it wants to or hit the breakneck pace it needs to, it’s an adequately entertaining way to spend an hour at the Fringe.

Phillip Andrew Bennett Low (maximumverbosityonline@gmail.com) is a playwright and poet, storyteller and mime, theater critic and libertarian activist, who lurks ominously in the desert wilds of St. Louis Park, feasting upon the hygienically-prepared flesh of the once-living. His main claim to fame is probably as co-founder of the Rockstar Storytellers, and as founder/producer of Maximum Verbosity, a garage-band-like theater troupe that is in a state of constantly re-defining itself.