Traces Toronto 2019 musci and dancing Archives - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Trace at the GCTC: play effictively traces impact of identity and family through time.

By Patrick Langston | November 17, 2019

Jeff Ho wrote and stars in trace. “We are women who do what must be done.”So says the cigarette-puffing, mahjong-addicted great-grandmother in Jeff Ho’s one-man play trace, now at the NAC. The fallout of doing what you must do, especially in fraught circumstances, is the subject of Ho’s taut, chamber piece about three generations of women in his family.

The nimble Ho plays his sharp-tongued great-grandmother, his icy grandmother and his hard-assed mother on a bare of any set except two pianos, which face each other. A scattering of items – lit cigarettes which appear in the great-grandmother’s fingers seemingly from nowhere, a few ashtrays, some sheet music, the clothes on the performer’s back – are the only props.

From this spare assembly of materials and a rich if occasionally confusing script, Ho fashions a textured world in which acute survival instincts, emotional defensiveness and a particularly tough form of love allow the three women to single-handedly raise their families as they struggle for a better life.

…