Photo courtesy of Capital Fringe
If you’ve got a spare moment, look up “Ambien Side Effects” on Google or WebMD. Most of them are pretty innocuous, but the one weird one, “unusual dreams,” (which Patton Oswalt ruminates on here) is the jumping off point for Ambien Date Night. Playwright Jessica Erin Bylander takes a little bit of artistic license, adding in “sleepwalking” and “split personality” as side effects that her main character experiences on the drug. No one will begrudge her that inaccuracy because the results lead to non-stop laughter.
The play centers around uptight and socially awkward Connie (Katie Maconaughey). She’s the sort of person that her boss, Mr. Campbell (played with the perfect degree of annoying goofiness by Derek Hills) regularly pats on the back for a job well done. However, she’s the kind of person that uses a timer to schedule her fifteen minute breaks and can barely hold a conversation with her love interest, relaxed and charming food truck entrepreneur Ty (Bryan Norrington). Also, she suffers from severe insomnia.
For this, her friend and co-worker Marianne (whom Amanda Haddock Duchemin plays with hilarious irreverence) gives her some Ambien. The drug makes Connie feel much better at work but also leads to some weird occurrences. She starts waking up in red heels. Full bottles of Juicy Juice appear in her kitchen. She also deadpans that she woke up one day covered in her own blood. At first this doesn’t seem to bother her at all but eventually, this nighttime Ambien-fueled alter ego, CJ, starts to affect Connie’s daytime life in all of the wrong ways.
Maconaughey makes the quirky Connie a character to root for even though such a punctuality freak might be annoying in real life. She’s equally engaging as the sultry temptress CJ and can seamlessly go back and forth between the two without blending the two personalities. This is especially noticeable during the mid-play montage wherein the lyrics “Connie’s boring-ass montage!” are harmonized as she moves between her bed, her job, and her late night transformation to show the passage of time.
Duchemin is also delightful and gets most of the play’s laughs as she comments on Connie’s life (and her own) with such a complete lack of a filter that Ty at one point accidentally assumes she has Tourette’s Syndrome. Norrington is the one grounded member of the cast with only a few brief forays into weirdness, which helps demonstrate that everyone else is in fact as loopy as we think they are.
Predictably, the coexistence of Connie and CJ starts to become a problem and the two eventually duke it out in the one place where both can exist—an unusual Ambien-fueled dream complete with a bear costume, pie-tasting, and boxing analogies. It actually seems like a weird and surprisingly unsatisfying way to end the inner conflict. However, it ultimately keeps the audience doing what they’d done for the entirety of the previous 60 minutes—laughing. This is one of the purest comedic performances that you’ll see at the festival.
Ambien Date Night is showing at Atlas Performing Arts Center: Lab II. Remaining performances are:
Thursday, July 23rd at 7:45 p.m.
Saturday, July 25th at 4:30 p.m.
Click here for more of DCist’s Fringe 2015 reviews.
