Actors Are People Who Lie to You, Aardvark, at Bailiwick Arts Center. Despite the title disclaimer, quite a few non-Equity truths emerge from this scrappy, 75-minute late-night “fantasia,” a collaboration between veteran playwright Robert Patrick and newcomer Andy Cobb. Actor-writer Cobb embellishes Patrick’s 26-year-old off-Broadway script with his own insider’s take on the embattled (store)front lines of off-Loop theater. Actors takes the form of a mock tribute to grunt player Arnold Bliss (Jon Collins, one of eight in Aardvark’s appropriately nonunion cast). Scenes and songs sketch this Everyactor’s imaginary and actual adventures: his failure to find a cultural identity (this child of Wilmette escapes into a gangsta fantasy life), his encounters with literally monstrous casting directors, and his bad experience rehearsing an anti-Vietnam epic, when he turns temperamental and misses his cues.
