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REVIEW

Blind Date, created by Rebecca Northan, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, running to Oct. 4.

Blind Date, Tarragon Theatre’s 2014 season premiere, is a difficult show to review.

There’s little point in me sharing lines that had me rolling in the aisles, because if you see the play you may not hear them.

Nor will I bother telling you which of its protagonist’s anecdotes resonated the most with me, because it may never come up.

And while I can loudly praise creator/star Rebecca Northan’s brave, singular performance, so much depends on the energy and material provided by her co-star and the audience that after watching the show on a different evening you may valiantly, and validly, disagree.

That’s because Blind Date is a two-hander, and Northan’s co-star is never the same from one evening to the next.

A work of what Northan calls “spontaneous theatre” that she’s been performing in one form or another around the world (including London and New York) for seven years, Blind Date’s setup is always the same: clown-nosed, French-accented Mimi (Northan on most evenings, understudy Christy Bruce during weekend matinees) arrives somewhere for a blind date. She begins a conversation with the audience, noting that she’s been waiting two hours for her date to show up.

Perhaps someone yells that he isn’t coming. (It’s okay, you’re allowed.) Perhaps Mimi realizes it herself. Then, noticing that she’s surrounded by eligible men, she plucks a new date from the audience.

That member of the audience — a genuine theatregoer, not a plant — becomes Northan’s co-star for the remaining 80–90 minutes of the show. In our case, it was Rohan, a 24-year-old engineering student from India.

I find myself wondering how rigidly Northan plotted Blind Date. I hope to see it again to find out. I know Mimi’s selection wasn’t completely random, since I saw Northan, in character, chatting up members of the audience before the show. I also expect the bones of the story remain the same: Mimi and her date start by having dinner, wind up at her home (in our case, her uncle’s condo, where she was staying while he travelled), and eventually the audience gets to choose the ending.

But my head aches imagining the number of ways this could have gone wrong. What if Northan’s co-star, so amiable in line, had become stiff as a board — or worse, a total ham — onstage? What if he refused to ask questions, or tell her anything about himself? What if she hadn’t managed to pull the audience along? (For the record, Rohan, who told Mimi she was his first date since his arrival in Canada, was game from start to finish.)

I learn after reading some behind-the-scenes material that Northan was helped immeasurably by understudy Bruce and Kristian Reimer, her “scenographers” — an old theatre term for actor/techs who do whatever is required of them — and her brother Jamie, who makes up all sound and lighting cues on the fly.

For instance, while Mimi was driving Rohan to her uncle’s condo, a glass of wine hidden beneath her dress, a police officer played by Reimer suddenly appeared and ordered the couple to stop. A visibly embarrassed Rohan was then forced to pull the glass of wine from between Mimi’s legs before she stepped out of the car, much to the audience’s delight.

Later, while cuddling with Rohan on her uncle’s couch, Mimi asked what he was thinking. He responded by asking what she was thinking, and she replied that part of her was going crazy wishing her date would kiss her. Rohan hesitated, Mimi’s hints becoming more obvious until someone in the audience — possibly this reviewer — yelled for him to kiss her already. He did, chastely, on the cheek. When she asked if he could do it again, she turned her head so that he kissed her lips, to much laughter and applause.

To the extent that I expected anything from Blind Date, I thought Northan would give Mimi a tragic, romance novel-worthy past that she would learn to accept by the end but, no, she came off like a normal person, with the type of endearing, yet mundane, first-world background that could have been shared by any member of the audience. We wouldn’t even have learned the reason for her nose (it makes her a shedload of grant money, apparently) had Rohan not asked.

In the end, I suspect it wouldn’t have mattered how shy or extroverted Northan’s date was, or how enthusiastic her audience, because it was obvious from the first line that we were watching a professional who knew exactly what to say no matter what happened — creating on the fly a show that earned a richly deserved standing ovation from everyone in attendance.