Show: Toronto Fringe Festival 2009 – “Zdenka Now!”

Writer: Precious Chong

Director: Adam Lazarus

Cast: Precious Chong

Theatre: Royal St. George’s Auditorium

We get to meet a handful of characters within writer/performer Precious Chong’s one-woman show Zdenka Now! who are all quite engaging… for a couple minutes each. We first meet the enthusiastic, colorful Zdenka, a Yugoslavian immigrant who reinvents herself as the host of her own TV show here in Toronto. She dances. She exercises. She gets “serious”. She’s thoroughly wacky and wide-eyed. And that’s kind of fun for a bit. But then what?

Throughout the course of the play, we meet a southern belle from Windsor working for the LCBO, an aboriginal male rapper who demands not to be called Eskimo, and a GM spokesperson who starts out enthusiastically pitching her product but winds up severely crashing down, among others (all portrayed by Chong). They are all engaging to a point, but the flaw lies in the lack of engaging journey. We get what they are about within these brief first impressions and Chong never lingers too long to explore more.

Chong is able to display a solid range of talent as a performer, but the show ends up feeling like a demo-reel, only offering glimpses of what she has to offer while never completing a compelling narrative. The characters are loosely thematically linked to various versions of loneliness, but the short video interludes between character transitions are not enough to fill the gaps of creating a well-structured show.

Zdenka Now! seems to come and go without too much resonance. Chong has created some decent characters (Barb, the GM spokesperson was perhaps the most exciting, while the titular Zdenka was more caricature than character – and the accent needs some serious work) but the show doesn’t celebrate the depictions with enough integrity. Director Adam Lazarus let’s Chong perform the show without guiding the narrative, and even though it is meant to be a sampling of these various characters, it still needs to follow a cohesive path in order to maintain viewer interest. Zdenka has most of the right makers for a good show, but it’s just not quite ready now.

Written by :

Arban

 

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