There is something endearingly earnest about Cusp, a one-hour late-afternoon opening that arrives at Toronto Fringe with its heart fixed firmly on the anxieties of early adulthood. Created by director Tanya Rintoul and the company, the production tips its hat to two 1980s films, The Big Chill and St. Elmo’s Fire, that framed memories, youth, friendship, and disappointment as both a social ritual and an emotional reckoning.
The former film gathered old college friends in the wake of a suicide; the latter followed recent graduates discovering that the world beyond school did not move according to plan. Cusp borrows from that lineage but shifts the lens to a group of eight twenty-somethings gathered at a cottage for a 21st birthday, where the future should feel wide open, yet it begins to press in from all sides.
Rintoul sets the action in a cottage kitchen, with a long rectangular table at centre stage and the sound of rain keeping everyone indoors. A Monopoly game becomes the production’s first useful pressure point, allowing rivalries, romantic entanglements, boredom and family tensions to surface. These young people may have their lives ahead of them, but they spend much of the play looking backward, worrying over wrong turns before some of them have fully taken the road.
The staging is at its best when it trusts the ensemble. Lighting designer Sephora N’Kosi gives each performer a brief, well-timed spotlight during the game, a simple device that lets the audience glimpse the private self beneath the social performance. It is one of the evening’s more effective theatrical gestures and is well suited to the intimacy of the Weyni Mengesha theatre at Soulpepper. Playing the game Fish is also fun to watch, as it is cleanly executed with choreographed, timely movement.
For the most part, Rintoul keeps the pace moving. The show rarely drags, though a few choices could use trimming. The table is used as an attractive visual anchor, with actors standing and lying on it for effect, but the image becomes awkward when a cake is being prepared nearby. A late round of hugs among the eight characters also slows the closing momentum; at the performance I attended, a few audience members seemed to shift in their seats, perhaps sensing the ending had already arrived.
Still, the chief pleasure of Cusp is its young ensemble. The actors are present, responsive and committed, and there is a genuine sense that they are listening to one another rather than simply waiting to speak. Particular attention falls on the young woman making her own birthday cake — a quietly comic pity in itself — who remains grounded in the task, measuring, mixing and listening with natural ease.
That attentiveness is what makes Cusp worthwhile. The script is still finding its sharpest dramatic shape, but a few more revisions will continue to add to the confidence of performers eager to tell a story honestly and in the moment. That counts for something as these actors do tell a good story at this opening.
Bottom line: A yes for Cusp. Shows like this will bring young people to the theatre. And that’s very important.
Running time: approximately 60 minutes with no intermission.
Cusp runs July 3, 4, 7, 8, 9 and 12 in the Weyni Mengesha Theatre at Soulpepper Theatre in the Distillery District, 50 Tank House Lane.
For tickets: https://fringetoronto.com/fringe/show/cusp.
TMI & CO. presents
Cusp
Created by Tanya Rintoul and the Company
Produced by Katya Podlesnaia and Chrisevina Tsoura
Directed by Tanya Rintoul
Lighting Designer: Sephora N’Kosi
Stage Manager: Jazmine De Sousa
Performers: Philip Diamond, Jaiden French, Kimia Kalantari, Jack Emerson Mosney, Kaleb Piper, Dale Rideout, Katya Podlesnaia, Chrisevina Tsoura
