Is God dead? Maybe. At least in the Nietzschean-sense. That’s what this play is about.
Desperately Seeking Something explores the existential crisis of young woman as she gives up all her worldly possessions to try to become a nun to give her life some meaning while simultaneously trying to tell the story of Artemis, Persephone and Hades.
As someone who is interested in mythology, I found the scenes uninspired. The whole Nietzschean idea of God fading away from our collective conscious and the meaning of death was done much better in the 90s by Neil Gaiman. The scenes with the gods were lackluster, despite lively performances from the talented actors.
The play is also hosted in a church and has some pretty heavy dialogue. Although there are moments of humour mixed in it, it seemed more like a lack of commitment to the heavy topics that they were discussing and pandering to the audience, who the play identifies as self-aggrandizing university educated hipsters residing in Toronto with its attempts of meta-narrative postmodernism to try to relate with the audience.
Despite only being 60 minutes, the show dragged on. The lead character Annie, played by Ewa Wolniczek, stumbled on her lines a few times. There was no sexual chemistry between the characters that were romantically involved, which is important for the subplot of the character Jake (played by Fraser Elsdon), who was suffering from sexual frustration and a conversation around celibacy was a good chunk of dialogue.
To top it all off, the show was poorly run and depending on your seat you may not had had a good look at the show you just paid money to see (several people struggled to see past the rows ahead of them) which was exacerbated by the fact that there were scenes where the characters knelt and sat. There was also salsa dancing going on simultaneously within the building which you could hear. The venue itself is small and can hold a little more than 100 people. Definitely pass on this one, completely underwhelming.