ast summer, one of my best friends got married and I was a bridesmaid. This year, there are four women in the ballet department wearing engagement rings (you should see the sparkle when we start doing pirouettes). We students have all reached the age when our friends are starting to get married, have kids, hell, I even have some friends my age who already have one divorce behind them. We can all find something to relate to in the Lab Theatre’s current production of Willie Russell’s “Stags and Hens” because it deals with marriage, friendship, careers and independence through the highly accessible medium of humor.

“Stags” and “Hens” are the British equivalents of bachelor and bachelorette parties: wild nights on the town for the bride with her bridesmaids and the groom with his “mates” to enjoy before settling down to married life. The play “Stags and Hens” is set in the bathrooms of a run down, blue-collar Liverpool pub in 1978 (the costumes and the way the actors wear them is reason enough to see the show). It takes place the night before the wedding of Linda (Cassandra Stokes-Wylie) and David, who spends the entire play passed out drunk on the bathroom floor and doesn’t have any lines—so maybe that’s why I couldn’t find the name of the actor who played him on the call sheet.

At first, this seems like your typical bachelor/bachelorette party. We already know that the groom has been tossing back the Black Velvets and Southern Comfort all night, while the bride is presumably locked in a bathroom stall with pre-wedding jitters. Conversations among the friends of the bride and groom in their respective bathrooms, while disco music relating to the subjects at hand plays softly in the background, reveal the characters’ fears about losing their identities and independence when they all eventually get married.

	Photo possibly by Jeremy Mathews

“You give up being a girl when you get married,” says Maureen, the token friend who gets extremely emotional over everything, played by the adorable Anna Christiansen. Meanwhile, the fiercely independent Eddie (Eric McGraw) reminds the men that David will miss the chance to be looked at by American soccer scouts because he will be on honeymoon in Spain.

When Peter Taylor (JC Ernst), an old flame of Linda’s—and a second-rate rock star wearing women’s boots—shows up to play a gig at the club where both the stag and hen parties are happening simultaneously (much to the chagrin of the superstitious bridesmaids), Linda begins to reconsider the reasons she wanted to get married and all hell breaks loose as the “tarts” and “gents” try to keep the couple together, only to wind up coupling off themselves. This is a great show for young actors and director Jaq Bessell has assembled a fine ensemble cast who, for the most part, maintain solid, comprehensible Liverpool accents for the majority of the show.

The ambiguous ending of “Stags and Hens” is a bit frustrating, if only because I am so uncertain of my own prospects of getting married. In “Stags and Hens” you will recognize your friends and yourself and the process of growing up, and if this scares the shit out of you, go see the show anyway because it’s funny as hell and thoughtful to boot.

“Stags and Hens” is at the Lab Theatre in the Performing Arts Building April 3 through April 6. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 4:30 p.m. on Friday and 7 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are only $5 for students and are available at the door, at Kingsbury Hall or through ArtTix (355-ARTS).
megan@red-mag.com