Review of About Face Theatre's Le Switch

Once upon a time I went to a show and it was called Le Switch. It was by Philip Dawkins and it was directed by Stephen Brackett. It was about a guy named David (Stephen Cone) and he goes to Canada for his best friend Zachary's (La Shawn Banks) bachelor party. And there he meets Benoît (Collin Quinn Rice) at a flower shop. Then they started talking and they started to fall in love. David is not very good at relationships, any kind of relationships, so you don't expect that he'll go falling in love any which way. The play is about falling in love in unlikely places, friendship, and different ways of thinking about being gay. I liked it a lot and I found it super intriguing and fun. I was very invested in the characters and I really wanted everyone in the show to have a good life.

Sometimes David feels insecure about how he expresses his sexuality, I think because of how badly his parents reacted to his being gay. I think that must have been very hurtful to him. The important part of his identity was that he was weird, or as he said, queer. Queer means to not just be in love with men as a man but to define yourself as someone who is different from other people. So David feels like you should just have to be in a relationship and that marriage for gays is not something he would ever do because he feels like gay marriage is not queer because it is so normal to get married. He learns a lot from his roommate Frank (Mitchell J. Fain) who had a partner who died: that it can also be good just to decide to stay everyday in a relationship that is not a marriage. Benoit is gay but he doesn't think of it as being queer. He just thinks of himself as being gay and that is the way he is. And Benoit really wants to get married. It shows you that everyone can be gay in a different way.

One of my favorite scenes was the game testing scene. David's sister Sarah (Elizabeth Ledo) basically has my dream job where she gets to read fantasy science fiction and keep track of the characters. The game is about this fantasy world where the entire world is held together by this couple's love. I loved how before Sarah had been saying "This is the worst job you could possibly have" but in this scene she is totally invested in these fictional people's lives. The scene was funny but also kind of sad, because one of the characters made one of the worst decisions of his life. But it was funny up until then because of the way Zachary acted about somebody proposing to somebody. (Sorry to be a little vague here, but there are a lot of spoilers in this scene.) He just kind of screamed and was so excited it was like he was getting proposed to himself. Zachary's entire personality just made it so I wanted him to be my friend.

This play was just so adorable. Benoit and David are like the perfect couple because you know that they love each other so much and they just click. But even perfect couples have fights, disagreements, and trouble in their lives. Just because they love each other, doesn't mean that they don't disagree about really important things. Every single character in the show is adorable and the entire time the people in the show are happy, you are basically happy. I found myself so happy and smiling for the whole first act of the show. I was very worried in the second act. I'm going to let you suffer too until you see the whole play. But it is definitely worth seeing. This is one of my favorite shows I've seen this year!

People who would like this show are people who like adorable stories, flower shops, and insanely enthusiastic best friends. I think that people should definitely definitely go see this show. I thought it was an amazing and absolutely lovely heartwarming story. I absolutely loved it.

Photos: Michael Brosilow