Stellar cast doubles down on hilarity in PTE’s Liars at a Funeral

Dearly beloved and decidedly estranged gather for overdue hellos and forced goodbyes in Liars at a Funeral, a genial comedy about changing characters that’s carried by a perfectly selected cast faithfully committed to the undertaking.

As the clouds of a superstorm encircle an unnamed small town, the relatives of Mavis (Mariam Bernstein) flow, one by one, into the Prairie Rest parking lot, returning to emotional territory they’ve long avoided or neglected until absolutely necessary.

“I only come home when someone’s dead,” Evelyn (Monique Marcker) says, scripting her mother’s eulogy in her head to her gay BFF Frank (Cory Wojcik) outside the chapel doors.

But the memorial will have to wait, even as granddaughter DeeDee (Shannon Loewen) and the ambitious funeral employee Quint (Mackenzie Wojcik, Cory’s son) pepper the austere premises with preparatory tissues.

The townwide “death drought” isn’t over just yet: Mavis — played with otherworldly energy by a barrel-rolling Bernstein — is still kicking. Knowing that her family’s schisms run deep, she believes that only the sting of false death can clear the air to inspire some belated honesty and forgiveness on her relatives’ part.

In this farce, playwright Sophia Fabiilli echoes her own surname by generously loading up on the doubles, giving each actor the opportunity to splendidly divide him or herself into two.

Marcker — who starred in PTE’s Joan Didion adaptation The Year of Magical Thinking in 2024 — once more brings tightly wound mourning to her depiction of Evelyn before unleashing Leorah, the lascivious parlour owner, as an out-of-the-loop foil.

As granddaughters DeeDee and Mia, Loewen, in her PTE debut, defines her characters’ personalities by their comfort with spectacle, making the most of roles that require subtlety and quiet.

The elder Wojcik plays Frank as straight as he can (“Go, Jets, go,” he shouts to underline his sexuality) and Evelyn’s ex-husband Wayne with big-city smarm, even if that city is Regina.

The younger Wojcik soaks up the embalming fluid to give Quint awkward, squeamish life, and as Mia’s partner Cam, he delivers some of the production’s most rewarding in-jokes during interactions with his offstage father, who, onstage as Wayne, is Mia’s absentee dad.

“Your relationship with your father is very hard to decipher,” Cam tells Mia, who hasn’t talked to her sister since DeeDee abandoned her avant-garde staging of Hamlet a decade earlier.

It’s to the actors’ and Fabiilli’s credit that this double conceit — which in other productions can feel burdensome to an audience tasked with keeping up — never causes a traffic jam in the narrative processional.

Fabiilli is not really trying to make the audience guess, which leads to a surprisingly potent level of trust that the plot will reach a satisfying end.

Under Ann Hodges’ pinpoint direction, enabled by Brian Perchaluk’s confessional chapel, the entrances and exits feel brought on by natural causes, while Daina Leitold’s costuming clearly delineates each character’s complicated grief as it sprouts up between the punchlines.

Throughout the season-opening production’s 115-minute run (with intermission), the family members get drawn into cahoots and collusion that could have been pulled from the home videos of Arrested Development’s Bluth family.

“If you want to fake your own funeral, you’ve gotta make it real,” Mavis tells her co-conspirators after popping out of her casket.

And if you’re selling it as a comedy, it helps if it’s really funny. Liars at a Funeral is.

Note: Current renovations to Portage Place have resulted in changes to street access to Prairie Theatre Exchange. See the Plan Your Visit section at pte.mb.ca for instructions on how to reach the venue.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca