Blind Dates is an hour long one woman show written and performed by Vivian Chong and directed by Marjorie Chan.  It’s a kind of odyssey in which Chong explores aspects of living with blindness via her experiences with dating and dating apps.

In some ways it’s very simple.  It’s in the very small extraspace at TPM and the set is maybe 5m square.  It resembles a seaside park.  There’s a grass covered couch, a boardwalk area, a beach and the sea.  Chong circumnavigates this space and talks, sings and plays to us.  Musically she’s rather accomplished!  Her words are captured by rather bad speech recognition software on a cloud above the stage.

Chong’s experiences are extremely varied and show considerable bravery.  She goes kayaking and paddle boarding on Lake Ontario.  She hikes in Algonquin.  She takes a solo vacation in the Dominican Republic.  She tries to find a job.  And along the way she meets men; mostly pretty unsatisfactory ones (they have substance issues, collect blind people or are otherwise weird).  She also wrestles with dating apps designed around photos and visual gestures.  And all the while she’s trying to define herself and be accepted as something other/more than (just) a blind person; a cute, multi-talented Asian perhaps (which she is).

She’s very personable and very funny and watching the show is a bit like meeting a really nice, very interesting person in a bar and listening to their life story and if that happened you would think you had a great evening.  But as theatre I’m not so sure.  There’s some limited interaction with the audience but it’s way short of a conversation and maybe that’s really what it needs to be.  So, bottom line, it’s clever and enjoyable but feels a bit incomplete and, so, a bit frustrating.

Blind Dates continues in the extraspace at Theatre Passe Muraille until March 9th.

Photo credits: Jae Yang