I Am Not a Dinner Mint is not so much a new Canadian play as the latest shipment from the trey anthony factory. It's strategically assembled (with co-author Rachael-Lea Rickards) to capture a segment of the theatre audience in Toronto that some artistic directors and independent mavericks have tried and failed to exploit fully.

The messianic author of the popular 'da Kink in my Hair believes there's an untapped market for plays about downtrodden, marginalized and abused women whose real-life counterparts will happily surrender up to $35 a ticket to see. As long as you cover it in the trappings of self-help or self-empowerment and give it some shadings of gospel -- shouts of "Amen" and "Preach" from the audience were not just common but actively encouraged by anthony in Friday's opening-night, housekeeping announcements -- no one can tell apart feminist politics from faith healing from empire building.

The role model for all that, of course, has been and continues to be Oprah Winfrey, to whom anthony has been compared to in Toronto media and from whose gospel of "self love" I am Not A Dinner Mint steals more than the proverbial page. What is it in your upbringing, the Oprah ethos goes, that told you that you were not valuable? Find the answer and all your problems, from bad relationships to crummy day jobs, will magically vanish. Why fight the system when you can wage a battle against the unsupportive part of your psyche from the comfort of your living-room couch?

To this pithy revelation, anthony and Rickards have added the metaphor of a dinner mint. All five women (Jemeni, Aktina Stathaki, Mandeep Kaur Mucina, Graziella Mastrangelo and Rickards herself, whose monologues comprise the essence of the play), share the feeling of being "an afterthought" -- that nice but optional thing that a dinner mint symbolizes. It's, no pun intended, a sweet metaphor and, judging from the multiethnic cast, a cross-cultural one as well. Sadly, it gets lost in translation by the end of the evening as the monologues get progressively darker in theme.

Examined individually, each monologue has a kernel of emotional truth and a note of resilient humour. They run the gamut from the experience of a jilted woman who runs into her former boyfriend on a day she looks (and her breath smells like) hell, to an overextended mother who hits her daughter in a moment of extreme pressure, to a physically abused black woman in Toronto's exclusive Bridle Path.

The disparity of the material is magnified by the insufferable bridging material (from the obligatory choral singing to the stereotypical role playing), which are meant to connect them.

Anthony takes the director's credit in the program, but judging from the clumsy pacing, primitive blocking and willy-nilly lighting, this cost-cutting exercise is textbook false economy. Among the many, many other things that I am Not a Dinner Mint needs, if it's to follow in the 'da Kink's commercial footsteps (and there's always hope), is a director/dramaturge to give physical shape to the production and to regulate the erratic beatings of its heart.

Of the five women onstage, only Rickards herself knows the difference between delivering a monologue and feeling her way through its emotional journey. She does it twice. First as a woman who learns how karma works on the dating circle, and then as the Bridle Path housewife whose material gain is coupled with the loss of self worth. A more professional cast, like the one assembled in the last two productions of 'da Kink, would have turned what is (generally) decent, if hardly inspired, material into a much more sophisticated production.

But on the trey anthony factory floor, sophistication is a luxury that, I suspect, is considered beyond the needs of the targeted consumers. What's more shocking is that this sloppy run follows from an intensive, open-to-the-public workshop production last July. In giving their show the subtitle/explanatory note, "The crap women swallow to stay in a relationship," anthony and Rickards are either unaware or choose to ignore the crap that they themselves are serving in the name of sisterhood.

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