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by Rosamund Small, directed by Mitchell Cushman

Outside the March, Morning Parade Coffee Bar, 256 Crawford Street, Toronto

March 5-30, 2025

Small: “Cars runs on gas. I run on compliments”

Writer and performer Rosamund Small makes her solo show Performance Review such an enjoyable experience that you may not notice how disturbing its underlying themes really are. In the course of 75 minutes Small details how seven of her jobs from age 18 to 30 ended. Small tells her tale with such humour and whimsy that she so completely draws you into her story you are reluctant to see it end.

Toronto audiences have seen plays by Small like Genesis and Other Stories (2014) and Sisters (2018), but she is probably best known for Vitals, her 2014 collaboration with Outside the March. Performance Review marks the first time Small has performed in one of her own plays, but it is fitting since the show has a strong autobiographical component.

Performance Review consists of Small’s narrative of her seven worst job experiences between ages 18 and 30. It begins with Small reading out the resume she used at age 18 which includes activities in high school dramatics. Her first job was at a Second Cup. There she realized that her “super-power” was the ability to “whoosh” into people. What Small means is that she found she was unusually empathetic to the point of being able to know what a client was thinking or feeling by assessing their expression, body language and tone of voice. Small’s super-power means that clients feel that she immediately understands them.

This power works extremely well for Small when a regular begins to request her as his server and starts leaving her increasing large tips which she splits with her co-worker. All goes fabulously well until the store owner expresses doubts about where all the money for tips is coming from. Worse than that, the owner decides to move to Sudbury and close the store. This leaves Small in a state of depression where she contemplates eating something inedible. “I could do it”, she tells herself, yet finally concludes, “But I won’t do it”.

This sets the pattern for the show’s next six sections. Small reads her newly updated resume, she tells us how the job went well, she tells us how something unforeseeable went wrong, she tells us the self-harming way she would like to react, but, fortunately, is able to pull herself away from it. Small’s method of self-harm is an eating disorder called pica, in which she feels the compulsion to eat something that is not food. In the course of the show Small, when suffering from anxiety considers eating such things as a marking pen, a broken ceramic mug and a marble.

When in a optimistic mood, Small tells us, “Cars runs on gas. I run on compliments”. The negative side of this is that absence of a job affects Small as absence of purpose which in turns feeds her overall anxiety of whether she will ever find out what her purpose is.

In the next six episodes Small recounts, she sees herself gradually moving into the realms of both theatre and television, first as an assistant, then as a writer. Each move upwards, however, ends in a disaster. Three of these episodes end because a male co-worker makes an inappropriate sexual advance. This happens even when Small joins a non-hierarchical creative cooperative where Small least expects such behaviour. One incident involves the strange mind games the female star of a comedy she is working on plays with those she employs. Only one is caused by an accident on Small’s part.

What Small’s play illustrates so clearly is how precarious a life in the arts can be. An arts worker lives from job to job with no safety net. It is disturbing to see how merit counts for little compared to the whims of superiors. A person has to learn which games to play and which not, and that will vary from one employer to another.

Small portrays herself as ever the innocent and ever the optimist until near the end of the play when she begins to garner enough acclaim that she gains some power of her own and some faith in herself. Small delivers all her lines in a very similar way with only the slightest change of inflection and loss of smile indicating a depressed state as opposed to her usual optimistic mood. This is intentionally jarring since makes Small’s depression sound like it is only a tiny remove from her happiness. Small continues in this two-sided mode until the end which only underscores how much doubt and fear an artist must wade through in order to achieve anything she believes in.

Small gives the impression, despite the show’s abundant humour, that she knows she has something to contribute but also feels very fragile in a world that does not value people, especially women, for what they think. That that she perseveres shows us that she is actually much stronger than she thinks she is. Small makes her alter ego so sympathetic we are on her side all the way.

Outside the March, a company known for its site-specific productions, stages the play in a real coffee shop, not a Second Cup, but the independent café, Morning Parade Coffee Bar. Even when crammed with chairs the space seats only 35. Director Mitchell Cushman has Small use the entire space behind the long wooden counter, in front of it and at all four corners of the room. Our being in a coffee shop is a constant reminder to us of Small’s first, most enjoyable job, just as it is to Small of a meeting place where she could comfortably get to know a wide range of people.

Outside the March has recently been trying to acquire the equipment to turn any space into a theatre space. These means will be particularly helpful in nondescript spaces, but not all sites for site-specific productions are nondescript. One of these is the Morning Parade Coffee Bar which has the charming atmosphere of a neighbourhood meeting place. At the start of the show, I expected the no frills of a typical site-specific show and was pleased with the coffee shop as it is. Small’s performance really needs no added production values. 

Yet, as it happens, Anahita Dehbonehie’s production design includes a large and varied number of lighting cues which may reflect the moods of Small’s story but, as least for me, began to detract from the whole point of seeing a site-specific show. The well-chosen space itself, Small’s marvellous gift of storytelling and her engaging, warm-hearted performance were all I needed for a thoroughly delightful evening of theatre.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Rosamund Small. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: outsidethemarch.ca.