On The Rails
Fringe
audiences who leaped onboard TJ Dawe's solo show Tracks had one of the best
rides at the festival. Dawe has proven himself an adept storyteller (Tired Clichés,
Labrador) in other one-person shows, but in this adaptation of autobiographical
writings by Jack London, he goes further, carving out three-dimensional figures
and narrative. He has a gift for conjuring up pictures for the audience -- vivid
filmic-style images complete with rapid-edit cuts -- that fill out the nearly
bare stage.
Dawe's material is mostly about riding the rails. It's the 1890s, and the teenage
speaker, filled with wanderlust, leads a hobo's life, travelling around the
States and Canada one jump -- sometimes literally -- ahead of the brakemen and
detectives who try to keep him off the trains he scrambles onto. With a simple
wheeled platform as his set, Dawe plays out a wonderful series of cat-and-mouse
games as the speaker rides between baggage cars and sometimes, dangerously,
under the cars themselves.
Tracks is probably the only show that's ever used the ambient sounds around the Tarragon Theatre to good effect. Audiences usually have to ignore the occasional passing locomotive and endless boxcars on the real train tracks across the street. Here, the clackety-clackety noise becomes the performance's serendipitous sound effect.
Jon Kaplan
Now Toronto
July 18-24, 2002
