Run for Your Life: A Story About What "Home" Is

Sinead Cormack (writer/performer) seems to be talented and certainly is likeable. I kept rooting for her play to entertain because I wanted her to succeed. But, there was no emotional traction in Run for Your Life and my patience with it ended long before the play did.

The story of Cormack’s life and travels, a story which could help us jump into exploring where and what “home” is and why we leave home to wander the world, is riddled with the holes of her running back and forth over a large map of the world traced on the floor, trying to land on each country (then each country's capital) in alphabetical order. Her dialogue is delivered in fragmented bursts, interrupted by the recorded recital of locations and empty rushing around; there’s hardly any story – it’s barely coherent in places.

Why Cormack chose to sacrifice storytelling for facts makes no sense; lists of Irish counties, lists of population numbers and languages spoken... the effort came closer to being a school report on geography than a meaningful creative piece. Considering that this show has similar reviews from other Canadian cities where it has run, expressing the same concerns as mine, I can only imagine that Ms. Cormack’s personal vision drives her to continue to mount the show as-is. Or, well-meaning audiences are confusing the artist – it’s polite to reward a person’s effort, but it’s dishonest to offer an artist (one who is working on her MA in theatre!) a standing ovation for a piece like this, as happened on its second night.

There is unfulfilled potential here – I hope at some point a total rework is done to develop it into something better.