A Tara Cheyenne Performance production. At the Cultch Historic Theatre on Wednesday, November 18. Continues until November 21

In her wonderfully warped new work, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg dances such a knife’s edge between comedy and creepiness that you often find yourself laughing and cringing at the same time.

The solo performer has never created such a twisted world—and that’s saying something, considering the imaginative genius behind bANGER: The Power Hour and Nick and Juanita: Livin’ My Dreams. Here, she channels a deeply troubled, and very funny, little boy. Like her characters of the past (the outcast headbanger Ivan comes to mind), he’s sympathetic but theatrically exaggerated—like reality that’s been skewed and magnified through a looking glass. Dressed in a crime-tape-yellow hooded sweatsuit and ridiculous goggles cinched up to blood-vessel-exploding extremes, Norman has been tossed in the basement by his baby sitter and retreats into a fantasy world of TV-style crime drama to escape the horror of his life. In one of Friedenberg’s finely detailed touches, his father has gone to Disneyland with a new girlfriend rather than with him. Still, nerdy Norman admits he’s not a fan of “cartoon propaganda”.

Yes, there is speaking in Goggles, but the structure is less narrative than fractured and imagistic. Where Friedenberg really expresses her characters is through intermittent dance sequences. The movement she’s developed for Norman is a bizarre, herky-jerky mix of childlike spazzing, hyperactive flailing, and body-clenching tantrums, all mixed in with the language of his obsession: one repeated, OCD-like gesture finds him pushing his fingertips methodically into the floor, like he’s giving prints. When he takes on the persona of a swaggering detective, he morphs into a cartoon David Caruso: he shoves his hands in his pockets, pokes rubber-gloved fingers into imaginary corpses, and barks out TV-crime-show clichés like “Talk to me!” or “Canvas the neighbourhood!” Friedenberg is a master of mimicking gesture, but her vocabulary here shows she has an ear for boob-tube dialogue too.

Friedenberg brings the character to life under the direction and dramaturgy of her long-time collaborator Sophie Yendole, but her artistic team creates the vivid world around Norman: Marc Stewart’s score is a haunting soundscape of melodramatic TV themes, sirens, walkie-talkies, and bullet shots; James Proudfoot’s atmospheric lighting finds red and blue lights flashing to create the police cars of Norman’s imagination or projected murder-scene chalk outlines for him to inspect.

Friedenberg keeps the audience in stitches throughout—at one point she flips her “interrogation lights” on the crowd. She could have gone even darker, and more focused, in the inspired final quarter; by toning down the deranged baby sitter’s antics and narrowing in more tightly on Norman’s own descent, it could be even more chilling.

Still, to witness her weird little boy, alone and hungry, pleading for a bowl of Lucky Charms, or just the leftover sandwich in his backpack, is more disturbing than anything you’ll see on CSI—Miami, Vegas, New York, or anywhere else.