Three Weddings And A Funeral (But Wait, There's More!)

By Julienne Bilker in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 20, 2009 4:10PM

A mudfight, a triple wedding, a funeral, a slightly acrobatic and very extended kiss between two hot ladies, a Bollywood-esque dance number, and several poetically awkward and perennially confused people struggling with love, death and fidelity. If we told you one play could include all of these elements while still projecting a modicum of sincerity, you might call us liars. Well, that’s fine by us, because you’ll have plenty of time to construct your apology and order us flowers on your way back from the Circle Theatre in Forest Park, where Charles Mee’s A Perfect Wedding opened on Wednesday.

For those of you unfamiliar with Charles Mee, a few notes:

• Much of Mee’s dialogue is taken from other sources. In fact, he encourages other artists to steal from him as well via “the (re)making project,” a venture through which all of his plays are available online, for free.
• Mee loves repetition. Monologues and dialogue are often repeated by separate characters within the same play, and sometimes are reused in other plays.
• It can take a minute or two to adjust to Mee’s everything’s-on-the-table style of writing, but stay with it - there is something incredibly cathartic (and hilarious) about observing people who express themselves with absolutely no subtext.

If you are familiar with Mee, you might recognize a few characters from some of his other works (Wintertime and Summertime), even if they’re not necessarily the exact same characters, but rather similar characters with the same names. Although they could be the same people, depending on how you look at things. But we digress…

Bottom line: check out this show. You’ll enjoy yourself.

A Perfect Wedding, through May 3, $20-$24, Circle Theatre, 7300 W. Madison, Forest Park, 708-771-0700