LUCIDMEDIA

It's a mid-life crisis before she turns ten. Meet Cassandra, a brilliant nine year old on the eve of her, shhh, 'double digit' birthday and she has got some big decisions to make. The play is quirky, entertaining, and highly adorable. What Cassandra is going through can aptly apply to any spectrum of people. At my particular viewing an eight or nine year old sat up front, a teenager and a mother behind her, and then a grandmother and her husband behind them. The audience was not only enraptured by Cassandra but relating to her with sympathy. 

Briana Brown stars in her one-woman-show based upon an in-class assignment she produced while attending York University. The assignment was to create a solo piece after an engagement with a professor at the University's Theatre department. The assignment was a hit and now it has been fleshed out and is performed on stage.  

We are introduced to Cassandra soon after a heated fight with her parents about allowance. Cassandra takes  a pop-eye cigarette from a carton and begins puffing on it while relaying her woes of childhood. No-one understands her, she has no friends, and anyways, the only friend she does have is her 'ultra cool' babysitter Morgan who is, in reality, payed to hang out with Cassandra. Cassandra is at odds with what to do with her life until the climax of the play when she reaches a pinnacle of realization. 

Cassandra is a very typical one-person show; it is filled with bows of humor, ribbons of wit, and streamers of wisdom. But with Briana Brown at the helm the play becomes an invigorating and intelligent discussion on dreams and youth. The small innuendoes that Briana conditioned herself into were played perfectly and with great timing. When she felt the need for relief she didn't pout, or cry, or mope, like we might imagine a child would do, she pulled out one of those pop-eye cigarettes and began puffing. At one particularly tense part Cassandra bites the cigarette and begins chewing only to correct herself after the laughter from the audience.  

For a bright afternoon excursion, Briana Brown took the audience through a maze of youthful niavete and adult dreams. There aren't any really philosophically wise moments, but being there on the eve of discovery and youthful enlightenment is a treatment worthy of any scholar.