Honesty and humour as darkness falls

KATE TAYLOR
Friday, November 24, 2000

SMUDGE

Written by Alex Bulmer
Directed by Alisa Palmer
Starring Diane Flacks, Sherry Lee Hunter and Kate Lynch
At the Tarragon Extra Space

Rating: ****

Smudge is a short, clear-sighted play about going blind, written by a woman who ought to know. Like her heroine Freddie, writer Alex Bulmer suffers from a rare, hereditary pigmentation of the retina that gradually obscures sight.

Diagnosed when she was 21, the disease has now left the 34-year-old actress and writer legally blind -- but with plenty of vision left to tackle the topic without sentimentality.

She's greatly aided by Alisa Palmer, artistic director of Nightwood Theatre, who mounts the play's quick sequence of scenes in the Tarragon Theatre's Extra Space with imaginative effects that evoke Freddie's predicament. The picture held out by an eye doctor is actually a magnifying mirror that grossly distorts Freddie's face.

Behind a hazy scrim, figures dimly appear while a sound design by John Gzowski and Deb Sinha creates a kind of aural confusion for the seeing audience with hovering music and mysterious flapping sounds.

In front of that scrim, the action is often much more concrete because Freddie is a down-to-earth soul, full of wisecracks even as her humour turns bitter.

Diane Flacks is well cast, creating a character who insists on seeing the world with honesty and humour through that unblinking look and emphatic physical presence. Kate Lynch rounds out the character comedy in various roles, including that of Freddie's patient new girlfriend, while Sherry Lee Hunter adds to the show's more elusive side with powerful physical work as a host of medical types and uncomprehending strangers.

Freddie goes through a passage of sorts, from humorous denial through depression to acceptance, but in eschewing easy answers and sentiment, Bulmer has also, understandably but more frustratingly, avoided fuller drama.

Freddie meets the new girlfriend, develops a relationship and has problems in it; Freddie tries psychotherapy but rejects it; Freddie finds some peace. The measure is tantalizingly scant.
Until Dec. 10; (416) 531-1827.