Review: (Toronto) The Collectors (Fringe)

Woman on the Verge
by Zoe Erwin-Longstaff

The Collectors boasts, one of the most compelling blurbs in the Fringe brochure. Dealing with “emotional poverty and debt” the play centers on a woman, Hannah, sequestered in her apartment, accosted by collection agencies, struggling to make art amidst disorder. But the play is not really interested in it’s own conceit. It doesn’t focus on debt, or the nature of debt, or anything to do with debt.  

What The Collectors really captures is an unstable and desperate woman, but the characterization stops there.  We don’t know anything about the art Hannah is purportedly trying to create, she refers only fleetingly to her misgivings about it, and even then only vaguely, “I don’t know what my work is actually worth. I don’t know who the judges are.  I don’t know how to reach them.”