Lies and Liars

Like many falsehoods, Lies and Liars is all attractive surface and little substance. The ensemble-created meditation on prevarication revolves around Ben (Brad Smith), a new janitorial employee of ALCOR (All Lies Censored Or Revealed), which keeps files on every lie ever told; the joke is that ALCOR’s office politics are as lame and petty as those of Dunder Mifflin. Interspersed among the scenes of wacky middle-management high jinks are bits in which a lecturer (Ina Strauss) imparts pseudo-scholarly knowledge on the psychology of lying, such as “the average adult tells three lies a day.” It’s all good sitcom-y fun until Ben reads his own file: ALCOR’s biggest no-no. Here, Liars takes a hard left turn; Ben’s file opens like Pandora’s box, sending him on some kind of mystical guided safari through a lifetime’s worth of lies.

It’s a genial enough hour or so, working from the fair if not terribly original premise that we’re better off not knowing the God’s honest truth about everything in our lives. A subtly charming sad-sack protagonist, Smith leads a wholly winning cast. Bordelon and Sanders’s direction is handsomely choreographed; Courtney O’Neill’s set, Justin Wardell’s lights and CJ Arellano’s video design are sharp and dynamic. But there’s something wanting in the storytelling. Liars is bursting with notions, so many that the creators seem to have lost track of them. Inconsistencies glare, even in a world this whimsical; the rules of who has access to the files, for instance, seem to change by the minute. Like real-life fibbers, Liars trips itself up in its contradictions.

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