Windows: unclear viewing

It's not clear what she represents but we think it might be Freudian.

Toronto: Windows, by Liz Peterson, and part of this year's SummerWorks Festival is deliberate, surreal and hard to pin down.

It's obvious that the strained domestic melodrama is less about the characters than what they represent, yet what they represent is far from obvious. The abstract and two dimensional characters are moved around the stage like chess pieces, stopped in place to deliver heavy handed dialogue often directed at no one in particular. There is clearly a lot of thought put into the artistic treatment of this work, but it’s an unfortunate case of too much style and not enough substance (or story). A weak and sloppy performance by Chad Dembski doesn’t help at all, but things are somewhat mitigated by Liz Peterson who, thanks to a calculated stepfordesque performance, makes for plenty of watchable moments.

By Justin Haigh