Consistently original TJ Dawe returns to his Newfie roots in Labrador, exploring some new poetic territory, infusing the production with a winning sense of wonder.
Labrador It's hard to turn quirkiness into a reliable virtue, but TJ Dawe is
so consistently original that he has become one of my favourite fringe performers.
He opens Labrador with some familiar cock-eyed questions: "whoever thought
of bread?", "what if everything in the world came with credits?".
But in this story of how he returned to his Newfie roots while touring with
a children's-theatre company, Dawe also explores poetic territory that's new
to him: describing his plane's descent at the Labrador City airport, he says
"It's as if we've flown into a blank sheet of paper." Dawe embraces
deeper feeling than he did in last year's Tired Clichés, too. When he talked
about meeting distant relatives and stumbling across a tragedy that might have
been his own if his family had stayed on The Rock, he made me weep. What makes
Labrador really clever, though, is that Dawe turns this emotion on its head,
revealing the lovely mechanics of theatre itself. I'll let you discover for
yourselves how he does it.
Colin Thomas
The Georgia Straight
Sept 7 - 14, 2000
