I, Claudia

By Kristen Thomson. Directed by Chris Abraham. A Crow’s Theatre production. At the Gateway Theatre on Thursday, May 8. No remaining performances

Kristen Thomson’s one-woman masked play I, Claudia is high-larious, as the title character would say. It is also a moving consideration of passion and deceit. At 12-and-three-quarters years old, Claudia is just starting to negotiate the treacherous terrain of adult feeling and moral compromise.

Drachman, the custodian at Claudia’s school, thinks that Canadians don’t experience the same level of emotion as his countrymen in his native Bulgonia do. There, he says, to desire “is to fall like a bleeding monkey on all of the bananas”. Still, he seems to recognize a kindred spirit in Claudia, who hides out in his boiler room every Tuesday morning.

Claudia’s parents are separated, and even though she puts her mother’s hairs underneath her father’s pillow—a trick she claims to have learned in voodoo class—they aren’t getting along very well. On Mondays, she spends a precious night with her dad, and on Tuesday mornings she is so bereft at the prospect of a whole new week without seeing him that she has to collect herself in Drachman’s lair. Parents regularly underestimate how important they are to their kids, and I, Claudia brings this point home. Claudia tells us, for instance, that she steals single socks from her dad. She’s testing to see if he notices that something is missing.

All of the characters are both dark and light. Claudia’s grandfather, Douglas, moves at a snail’s pace. “I’ve never seen a wrapper so in love with a lozenge,” he says as he slowly picks away at it. But we discover that even this relaxed charmer is capable of betrayal.

Director and sound designer Chris Abraham’s production is as beautifully textured as Thomson’s writing. “This is going to be fun,” Claudia says, just before the boiler room erupts into a disco, spangled by mirror-ball light and rocking with music. For the most part, the basement room echoes with surreal drips.

Liisa Repo-Martell delivers a remarkable performance. Her Claudia, Douglas, and Drachman are all completely distinct. Dad’s new girlfriend, Leslie, sounds a lot like Claudia does, but her physicality is admirably different.

The script pays more attention to character than narrative arc, and it works on that level. The payoff is emotional honesty. As Claudia says: “Life is so, like, true sometimes. Do you find that?”