THEATRE REVIEW: OH MY IRMA
12 JAN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating 1.5 out of 5

TORONTO - There's something very small about OH MY IRMA, the new one-woman show that's taken up residence in the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace this week. But we're not talking small in the conventional sense.

The Backspace, for instance, is small, as is the diminutive Haley McGee, the playwright/performer behind the 65-minute work. Come to think of it, by normal theatrical standards (which is to say, beyond the Fringe circuit) a 65-minute play could be considered a small -- or, at the very least, a short -- piece of theatre. But that's not the kind of small we're talking -- and frankly, to understand the kind of small we mean, you might have to know more about the play.

On the surface of things, OH MY IRMA is about laundry, and yes, we're talking dirty laundry, and lots of it. That's because the Irma of title, a laundress of sorts, is what is known in mental-health circles as a cutter -- a person who takes pleasure in or comfort from self-inflicted wounds. As a result, the wardrobe sported by her mentally fragile daughter, who self-identifies as Mission Bird and specializes in 'reading' laundry, is stained with her mother's blood. Some of it has dripped into the laundry over the years and thereby stained her clothing and some of it has ended up there after Mission Bird watched her mother bleed to death from self-inflicted wounds. But that is all in the past when OH MY IRMA starts.

Having been freed by her mother's death from the demands of a hugely complicated existence, Mission Bird has set out to solve the mysteries of her mother's life -- specifically, to track down the owner of the bloodstained man's dress shirt which served as an iconic but unexplained touchstone in the late laundress's life. Conveniently, a business card she finds in the pocket of that shirt bears an address and the initials P.P. and that leads Mission Bird to a luxury apartment in the downtown of a large unnamed city. There she comes face to face, not only with a man who bears the initials she's looking for, but also with his overweight dog -- a dog that for whatever reason has been named Irma too.

While the big picture here is pretty predictable, there is a degree of mystery in the small scenes. Indeed, what McGee seems to be doing here is creating a shaggy dog story to keep her audience guessing as to how she is going to lead us to an all but inevitable conclusion that never really comes. Happily, she has the full support of director Alisa Palmer, who does her utmost at every turn to underline McGee's quirky charms as a performer, as OH MY IRMA unfolds on a simple stage, beautifully lit by David Degrow, featuring costuming by Camellia Koo.

And thanks to Palmer et al, it is a polished production, but, with all due respect to a talented director, that only serves to underline how small a show this really is. In exploring Irma's life and the lives of those who loved her, McGee leads us into dark and disturbed emotional waters. And while she does it fearlessly, she does it seemingly not out of any deep sense of compassion nor even a desire to inform, but rather, merely to demonstrate her own admittedly considerable abilities as a performer. While few would argue that damaged characters like these have no place on our stages, fewer still, one suspects, would support the idea of bringing them there as mere amusements.

By OH MY IRMA's end, it is obvious that if the title character had cut no deeper than the playwright, she would still be alive. Finally, this show is small because it makes its audience feel diminished for having watched it.