The idea of searching for a lost parent is particularly fertile territory. So it is disappointing to report that Nora Brown’s one-woman show is an utterly barren fifty minutes that fails to live up to any promise of the subject matter.
The premise is simple. A dancer from Winnipeg looks for her father and this takes her through different men, including past lovers, in her search for her history. As Brown explains, she engages in solo dance routines. I initially thought these scenes were supposed to be a parody but the tone was serious throughout. The moves are heavy-footed and – especially during the tango – ridiculous. They do not add anything to the script and indeed detract from its delivery.
The show rises or falls on the story itself and it too is found wanting. We are dropped in medias res but Brown never makes us care about the character’s upbringing or lack of father. She just needs to find him and any potential empathy is therefore lost. All the characters seem narcissistic, inhabiting their own isolated bubbles where real-life concerns simply don’t matter. Some of the accents are horrific, varying from comedy Italian-American to Midwest within a matter of words. While I’m not calling for some hard-nosed kitchen sink drama, the lack of any engagement with reality wholly breaks the suspension of disbelief. The pace is leaden and the script filled with extraneous details. Instead of adding tension, it bored. Ideas are repeated to us till tedium sets in. Brown’s performance is curiously sterile – dancing seems to substitute for any emotional displays.
This is a poor performance of a poor script that definitely needs an editor. Brown wrote and designed the whole show and her closeness to it clearly shows. With a clearer focus, there is a needle of a performance about loss and yearning waiting to be dug out; it just requires someone with a great deal of patience to dive into a very large haystack.
