Review: "Hunter and Li Find Toni Collette"...And We Find It Funny








Hunter and Li Find Toni Collette

Written by Liam Blanchard

Presented by Something from Abroad and FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks

94 Saint Marks Pl., Manhattan, NYC

October 24, 2024

Buying or moving into a new home is always a dicey proposition in the horror genre; ask any couple, from The Amityville Horror's Lutzes to Malik and Aaron of 2019's Spiral. To this list, we can add the titular Hunter and Li from playwright Liam Blanchard's hilarious, high-energy farce Hunter and Li Find Toni Collette. This past week's performance of Hunter and Li Find Toni Collette was part of FRIGID New York's Days of the Dead festival, which is inspired by Día de Muertos and runs from October 17th to November 2nd, featuring a range of shows themed around death and the afterlife.

In the play's early going, Li (Liam Blanchard) just wants to spend a nice evening watching the Toni Collette-starring horror film Hereditary with Hunter (Hunter Anderson) in their newly purchased home in upstate New York. Unfortunately for these plans, that home is a creepy fixer-upper with covered-over windows and a pile of trash in the corner. On top of that, a thunderstorm is raging outside, and the power keeps going out. As the couple banters about topics from Collette in The Sixth Sense to their plans for home renovation, they discover something (formerly someone) among the piled refuse that turns their evening in a very unexpected direction. Further unsettling the pair, and equally unexpectedly, a woman named Steph (Katrina Wischusen) turns up. Steph, who might charitably be described as a little odd, says that she used to live in the house. Does that discovery among the trash have anything to do with Steph and her possibly troubled past? And what does either have to do with further surprises for Hunter and Li, such as a disembodied voice or the arrival of a wildly incongruous officer (Katrina Wischusen) of the law (probably)?

All of this might be stressful for Hunter and Li, but it's pure fun for the audience. The crisply staged production, complete with a few nicely implemented low-tech special effects, brims with fast, funny exchanges delivered with comic flair and some well chosen flourishes of physical comedy. Undergirding the hilarity, Anderson and Blanchard establish a sweet relationship between Hunter and Li, while Wischusen provides the perfect complement to their disrupted domesticity as she uproariously inhabits multiple characters of varying outlandishness (and accents). Hunter and Li Find Toni Collette won't change anyone's mind about the horrors of homeownership, but it will provide a concentrated dose of lightly macabre enjoyment for way less than a mortgage.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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