I, Claudia evokes a rare power

GCTC opens its season with a surprise

Liisa Repo-Martell stars in I,Claudia. Photo: Alan Dean

I sat for I, Claudia assuming that I would experience nothing firm enough to crack the veneer of being an audience member. But I was wrong. When I glanced towards my companion and saw tears on her cheeks in the stage light, I knew I wasn’t alone. Playwright Kristen Thomson’s Claudia is a marvellous creation: a young girl reeling from the separation of her parents and her father’s remarriage. Initially she comes across as precious, but by the conclusion any remnant of this is washed away by the elemental power of her pain and loneliness.

The play spirals out to explore the loneliness of others in related orbits. A janitor affords Claudia space to breathe when overwhelmed. But displaced from his country and his language, he mourns his inability to connect. Her father’s fiancée Leslie, when seen not through the one-dimensional eyes of a child, shows an all too familiar desperation and fear.

Liisa Repo-Martell is absolutely wondrous in this one-woman show. Each character is tremendously polished, and she transitions from one to another with ease. She has the interesting ability to be powerful in stillness: In the final touching monologue, Claudia is seated and still but you can almost feel the tempest circling her.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Sept 18, 2008
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=15590