Cristina Tudor and Alexander Forsyth in Lia & Dor, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Lia & Dor (Stage 3 (Nordic Studio Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Dreams and memories, not fairies, are caught in the web of “once upon a time” spun by Lia & Dor.

In Cristina Tudor’s artful tale, inspired by Romanian folklore, the world is a fantastical place of journeys without destination, where animals speak, the generations mingle, and longing takes shape. But it’s also strangely familiar, like a flower between your lips, the taste of a mint leaf, basil under your pillow, the route through the village into the misty forest.

Lia (Tudor) is a young girl yearning for love, and footing in the world, and she’s contains all the generations before her, her mother, her grandmother, her auntie. And Keltie Forsyth’s production tucks into this particularly theatrical (and small cast) form of enchantment: the world and the people and animals in it are conjured by two actors.

Tudor plays Lia, and Lia contains all the generations before her — mother, grandmother, great aunties…. A lot of relatives, says Lia’s user-friendly stage companion, demanding on our behalf an annotated list of the characters to forestall confusion.

To Alexander Forsyth falls the exotic task of playing Dor, Lia’s Dor, invisible to others, but very tangible and wry in the person of the actor. Lia’s grandmother explains that everyone has a Dor, the embodiment of the elusive but somehow visceral sense of yearning and wanderlust, that indefinable mingling of aspiration, love, sorrow. In three letters, Romanian nails something that gets away from the English language. The Welsh title of Belinda Cornish’s Hiraeth, which premiered a season ago, has something of that wispy force, missing something you’ve never yet had.

Like dreams and the oddity of remembering the future, Dor goes forward and back in time, pretty much interchangeably. He (they?) waits, but not forever. And the journey into the forest Lia undertakes, at the centre of the show, ingenious in its simplicity, is to release Dor from a curse. Nature is full of dangers: a wounded wolf (an exquisite mask donned by Forsyth), a very attractive giant snake with a killer smile. Their voices are a blend of two voices. And there’s music: haunting songs in Romanian are a cappella as if they come direct from memory.

Like so many fairy tales, including the kind with fairies, Lia & Dor is a love story. And it’s haunted by the generations of love stories that have come before. This charming production sets them all in motion on a bare stage. And there’s magic in that.