Fringe review: These family secrets deserve to be shared

The Times Colonist is covering the Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival, running to Aug. 31. All ratings are out of five.

What: Spilling Family Secrets

Where: Downtown Activity Centre

When: Aug. 24, 25, 29, 30

Rating: 4

Susan Freedman’s one woman show, Spilling Family Secrets, is warm delight.

On paper, it may not sound that promising. Freedman, grey haired and red spectacled, uses slide projections to tell the story of her mother and father’s long marriage.

In fact, the tale is compelling. As a child, Freedman (a strong, engaging performer) found a cache of her parents’ love letters. Her mother scolded her, and Freedman wouldn’t see the letters, written in the 1920s and ’30s, for another 55 years.

Re-reading them, she realized it was an epic love story. The letters, quoted often, are very romantic (the pair’s devotion to one another never wavered over the years) and often funny. At one point, Freedman’s father, declaring his fidelity, writes: "Other girls are like mushrooms to me."

The show also gives a snap-shot of Depression-era Canada, with her father overcoming working-class poverty to become a lawyer.

Freedman is particularly successful in intertwining her parents’ story with tales of her own sometimes tumultuous life (she was married three times) and her daughter’s impending marriage. Ping-ponging among three narrative threads is an ambitious undertaking; it’s done here with skill.

There’s a bona fide and heart to Spilling Family Secrets — a show worth seeking out.

More Fringe coverage HERE