Performance Review

Performer and creator Rosamund Small sips a small green coffee cap, her pinky finger daintily held in the air. Small, a 30ish white woman with long dark brown hair, wears a blue apron over a white blouse. She is behind a coffee shop counter, surround by coffee shop paraphernalia.

An Outside the March Experience

Created and performed by Rosamund Small
Directed by Mitchell Cushman

On a young woman’s first day at her first job, a man tips her $15. The next day, he tips her $100. Then $150. She’s not THAT good at making cappuccinos.

So begins the first of seven stories about seven worst days at seven jobs by award-winning playwright Rosamund Small. Performance Review is a shockingly-funny and just plain shocking examination of power dynamics and sexual violence in the workplace in the style of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Sarah Polley’s Run Toward the Danger, “and,” says Small, “stay with me here… also with inspiration from The Communist Manifesto.”

Performance Review is told intimately and immediately by Small herself as she serves coffee to a 30-person audience in real time at Dundas West’s Morning Parade Coffee Bar. Inspired by true events, it marks her return to writing a new play after seven years working in television and as an educator—and will feature her first-ever turn as a live performer.

Why would she do that to herself? “There’s no intermediary,” says Small. “It’s honest. When I go to the theatre I want to feel like the artist is really there with me. Like we give a shit about each other. And I want to have a good time. You’ll have a good time!”

You will. The project is directed by OtM Artistic Director Mitchell Cushman. It features production design by Anahita Dehbonehie and sound design and composition by Heidi Chan, both long-time OtM collaborators whose work on last year’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney was celebrated as “Best Designed Production of the Year” by the Toronto Theatre Critics Awards. The piece is production managed by OtM Director of Production Tori Morrison, who has led production on all of OtM’s recent work.