Arts & Culture

What: Table for Two
Where: Soulpepper Theatre, 50 Tank House Lane
When: Now, until Sun., March 2
Highlight: Akosua Amo-Adem’s lead performance in a role tailor-made
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: It’s a side-splitting rom-com with sincerity to spare

BY THE TIME you’re reading this review, Valentine’s Day 2025 will be over. Toronto theatre has been committed to packing this February with a smorgasbord of shows about the follies and triumphs of dating in the 21st-century, from Bad Dog’s Hookup bringing lonely singles together through the power of improv to Vivian Chong’s Blind Dates treating audiences to romantic storytelling and ukulele ditties at Theatre Passe Muraille. Joining the party is Soulpepper and Obsidian Theatre’s world premiere of Table for Two, cleverly written by and starring Akosua Amo-Adem and playfully directed with care by Canadian theatre legend Djanet Sears. It’s a show worth seeing for the rom-com lover in us all, ever-so-slightly subverting the genre by placing less emphasis on coupling and more on its protagonist’s sincere pursuit of self-actualization.

Amo-Adem plays the unlucky-in-love Abena, who at age 35 has thrown in the towel and entered the hellscape of online dating. Well … that’s the setup, but it also feels like a somewhat misleading focal point, despite the show’s marketing leaning heavily into that topical angle. Apart from a brief opening monologue and one truly horrendous date with a (mis)match that she could have more easily known to reject had they originally met in person, most of the plot is essentially concerned with the difficulties of dating more generally rather than online dating specifically. Don’t go in expecting too many musings on receiving unwanted messages from creeps, writing an eye-catching bio or navigating the casino logic of left and right swiping.

Instead of a parodic takedown of dating apps, Table for Two turns out to be a delicate character study of a hopeless romantic, with enough side-splitting humour to never lose its comedic tone, even when swinging between maudlin emotional lows and cheer-worthy highs. The main thrust of the narrative is a series of flashbacks depicting Abena’s romantic and personal journeys thus far, framed by a waiting game while she fears that she’s about to be stood up by her best prospective suitor yet. It’s just Beckettian enough for you to get the allusion without spending the whole hour-and-forty-minute runtime (without an intermission) stewing in anticipation. Maddie Bautista’s bassy sound design keeps it all moving, paired like a fine wine with the red colour palette that defines much of Nick Blais’s expressionistic lighting and Astrid Janson’s set and costume designs.

The show’s success is undeniably attributable to Amo-Adem’s sheer likeability as a performer, making it easy to root for her from beginning to end. Despite featuring three stellar supporting players, this piece is tinged with what we might call a “solo show energy.” Abena spends a lot of time speaking directly to the audience, inviting the roughly 200 spectators to feel like intimate confidants and members of a hype-squad.

Ryan Allen plays all of the various men Abena encounters on her dating odyssey — clearly she has a type — traversing the difficult tightrope of being dreamily suave in one moment and nightmarishly cringe-inducing in the next. Meghan Swaby completely sells all three letters of the “BFF” acronym in her portrayal of Abena’s platonic soulmate, Janelle. There’s a lifetime of camaraderie electrifying every one of their scenes together, perfectly contrasted against Swaby’s double-casting as the restaurant’s server, whose awkward unfamiliarity and unspoken judginess conjures a hilarious sense of unease.

But the character that I can’t stop thinking about is Abena’s mother (Bola Aiyeola). She initially seems like only a comic relief as the old-school Ghanaian parental figure, but there’s way more to her. She occasionally peppers in factoids about their Ghanaian heritage, from matrilineal bloodline inheritance to customary dowry protocols. These tidbits add texture to Abena’s undercurrent of self-discovery but sometimes feel a little inorganically shoehorned into the script, as if temporarily hitting pause to make room for a culture lesson. In the hands of a less talented actor and director, these insertions could have ground everything to a halt; thankfully, that never became a serious issue under Aiyeola’s spellbinding performance and Sears’s steady hand.

It’s impossible not to draw significant parallels to Kim’s Convenience while these two plays are occupying the Young Centre in tandem: both are comedies about assimilated adult children clashing with their immigrant parents’ traditional values, featuring their respective playwrights in showy leading roles and matter-of-factly representing an underrepresented piece of the Canadian mosaic without making a big deal about the total absence of whiteness on stage. As much as I enjoyed Table for Two, I’m not yet convinced that it’s quite as extraordinary as I found Kim’s to be. I’m hoping to be proven wrong about that; perhaps it needs a decade or so to percolate in the zeitgeist and accrue its own mythology. Until then, it’ll make a terrific date night.