Independent Aunties’ extraordinary Breakfast is receiving a welcome remount at Buddies in Bad Times. When it was first presented in 2008, the hour-long play was subtitled “A Production in Progress.” By now we can assume Breakfast has reached its final form.  As the Aunties’ most technologically complex show, it takes the audience on an thrilling journey from the real to the surreal.

In an all-too-realistic kitchen of a cheap apartment, we meet Marnie (Karin Randoja), a pleasantly plump young woman still in her nightie and fuzzy slippers, about to begin her breakfast of chocolate pudding and coffee. She puts a self-help tape into her cassette-player and a soothing voice (Evalyn Parry) urges her to find “the well of infinite love” within her and to repeat various self-affirming statements. Inexplicably the voice becomes more personal and demanding and Marnie’s relation with it increasingly interactive until she is literally detached from reality around her to emerge into a realm of pure psychodrama. The self-help industry preys on people’s desire for transformation and the Aunties begin with this desire, taking it to its dramatic and theatrical conclusion. The play’s new ending is theatrically perfect but the text about climbing a staircase into the light is unexpectedly weak.

Randoja gives a wonderfully warm-hearted performance. She projects such a strong sense of a good person whom life has passed by that she wins our sympathy and support before she even says a word. Parry, dimly lit off-stage, flawlessly captures the professionally subdued yet insistent tones of mass-market personal improvement gurus. The show is an ideal melding of acting with all aspects of design -- set and costume (Julie Fox), lighting (Laird MacDonald) and sound (Richard Windeyer). With Breakfast, Independent Aunties have reached a new level of sophistication that only enhances their characteristically absurdist, satirical humour, not to mention a further exploration of what theatre can do.  I can’t wait to see what they do next.