Uncalled For Presents: Today is All Your Birthdays: brainy and zany

Vancouver: Clever and fast-paced, Today is All Your Birthdays, created and performed by Uncalled For  is a satisfying absurdest mash-up of ideas, some gleaned from pop-culture and others freshly minted in obscure crevices of the creator's minds. 

It begins with the notion that a man's love affair with a “rift in the space-time continuum” has resulted in the birth of sixty-eight paradoxical babies whose very existence could wreak havoc on the nature of reality itself.  From there the performers launch into a rapid-fire series of vignettes, each more outrageous than the last.

Recurrent characters include the crew of a doomed spaceship; scientists running a time-machine (that is, a Hadron collider with time-traveling capacities) on the border between Switzerland and France; a honeymooning couple with pyromanic tendencies; a BBC host called Vernal Equinox; a narcoleptic hypnotherapist; an exceedingly tall jogger; and a pair of crusty senior citizens who discover that they seem to be aging faster than usual.  Sketches branch off each other in a network of loosely associated ideas but the sci-fi premise runs throughout.

Dan Jeannotte and Anders Yates perform with gusto and intelligence, maintaining a relentless pace from start to finish.  Jeannotte seems to possess boundless reserves of barely contained hysteria and moral outrage that serve him well in his various roles, while Yates brings a contemplative aura and a physical plasticity to the stage.  They operate symbiotically, and their gags are impeccably timed.

Today is All Your Birthdays is brainy, zany, and very funny – don't miss it.