On a recent Friday night, I sat sipping my Summit while watching a young couple engage in a drunken public spat. The woman had taken one too many shots and was about to let the liquor do the talking.
Like everyone else around me, I sat there riveted. The woman had been slamming shots of Jagermeister and Jack Daniels like they were heat-seeking missiles ready to explode. Boom. They detonated and she let loose a cacophony of insults, most unfit to print. Let's just say her final blow compared the boyfriend's manhood to the slender dimensions of a ballpoint pen. Ouch.
I laughed and just about everyone else in the room did, too. The response was encouraged -- we were watching a play, after all.
But this didn't seem like any other play I'd seen. Being that it was a sketch comedy, intermission came every 10 minutes. Drinking games filled the downtime. Sex jokes filled the sketches. All and all, it was an evening overflowing with debauchery.
In other words: My kind of theater. In its fourth week, "Bye Bye Liver: The Twin Cities' Drinking Play" has been drawing crowds to the intimate Hennepin Stages theater. In the 75-minute show, a young cast moves through a half-dozen sketches, each an exposition on the drunken, hilarious situations we've been witness to or experienced ourselves.
The language is lewd and the humor can be crude. As one of the actors, Mike Rylander, told me:
"We're not doing high Shakespeare art. It's an interactive drinking show."
"Bye Bye Liver" was created four years ago in Chicago by playwright Byron Hatfield. By phone last week, he told me six years of college proved to be "research" well spent. His Pub Theater Company performs the comedy four times a week and has recently expanded to Milwaukee and St. Louis. Minneapolis is the first franchised version, this one put on by the Actors Theater of Minnesota and Hennepin Theatre Trust.
