Dayna Lea Hoffmann in A Hundred Words For Show, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

We surround an ice floe that seems to float in a sea of white. It’s overhung by translucent icicles. And there on a pillar of ice, lit from within, is an urn.

Alison Yanota’s design for A Hundred Words For Snow, with Matt Schuurman’s projections and Daniela Fernandez’s otherworldly sounds, creates a kind of chimerical kingdom of ice. And the young character we meet in this solo play by the English writer Tatty Hennessy imagines it, dreams of its magical snow bears, conjures it for us. And propelled by grief, she sets forth towards it, a 15-year-old on her own, sans mom. It’s an adventure into the unknown, a coming-of-age journey in honour of her dad.

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He’s the occupant of the urn. At the outset Rory introduces us. “And this is Dad. Say hello, Dad…. He’s shy. Used to be a lot more talkative.” In life Dad was a geography teacher captivated by the idea of exploration and the great snow-enshrouded mystery of the North. “You never got to go, but I can take you.”

That’s her gift to him. His to her is a shared wonder about a world of ice, its magical white bears, its five North Poles, its mythologies to either embrace or debunk (the one about the thousand words for snow falls into the latter category), its “beardy” old-school explorers like Shackleton and Peary. This is a dad who read his kid Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen instead of a bedtime story.   

It’s a complicated, not to say virtuoso, theatrical challenge to which Dayna Lea Hoffmann rises impressively in Trevor Schmidt’s production. In an incandescent performance this terrific actor creates and fully inhabits a dimensional teenage character who’s simultaneously telling us a story, remembering it, annotating it, and actively participating in it in the present moment. Rory is resourceful but naive, endearingly candid and witty about the fragility of self-esteem, and that acute teen feeling of being an outsider looking in, hoping to pass muster: starchy and confident one moment, tentative and doubt-filled the next.

The play is the voice of a teenager exploring the world outside and the world within, and both are exotic. Hoffmann’s performance effortlessly captures the teenage cadence — “mortifying” and “obviously” occur again and again. Rory’s no pushover; she’s quick to spot adult bullshit, environmental warming that threatens to strand the inhabitants of the ice kingdom, cultural prejudices, sexism (like the token display, on a pink board, of a woman explorer in the Tronsø Polar Museum in Norway). A smart kid, Rory’s a magnet for information and she enjoys her knowledge (the more arcane the better). But she’s open to revelations, including a seminal vision of joining the continuity of generations of women.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann in A Hundred Words For Snow, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Rory’s fall-back position, as a teen skeptic, is wit. But she’s open to enthusiasm, too, as Hoffman’s engaging performance conveys. I’m thinking of Rory’s capture of the eerie experience of vast whiteness, in all its variegation, and her review of apparent  nothingness, on a scale and with a history: “It’s pretty amazing. Nothing. Amazing nothing. Nothing people died finding. Nothing full of bleached bones and tiny creatures and singing ice.”

Schmidt’s production has a rhythm of perpetual motion, with moments of stillness that Hoffmann’s performance animates with thought, and reassessment. Rory’s preparations to go to the North Pole, armed with a book, a backpack, and her mother’s credit card, have some fateful shortcomings, as she confesses. She’s a repository of obscure nordic information, true, but she needs to be rescued. And in the end, in a  touching way, she comes to realize that grief is something that can be shared.

Rory talks, more than once, about “the skin of the world.” It’s a reference to ice, but it resonates with the idea of exploration beneath the skin. It’s a play that speaks to the coming-of-age experience of loss, and how to remember someone you love — in their enthusiasms, in what they taught you, in what they’ve inspired you to teach yourself.

It turns out, as per Nansen, that “love is life’s snow”: is one of the mythical hundred words for snow “love”? As Rory says, “wherever we are we’ll always have been there.” It’s a mantra for theatre, so ephemeral and so indelible.

Check out 12thnight’s PREVIEW interview with Dayna Lee Hoffmann.

REVIEW

A Hundred Words For Snow

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Tatty Hennessy

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Dayna Lee Hoffmann

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn

Running: through May 6

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com