One of Canada’s most celebrated voices, Daniel MacIvor, returns to his theatrical roots
Daniel MacIvor is one of Canada’s most respected theatrical artists. Widely renowned as both a writer and performer, he built his early career on stunning, engrossing one-man plays before leaving the genre to take up different challenges. This Is What Happens Next will be his return to the one-man-show format after years of sabbatical. When asked why he moved back into this kind of writing and performing, MacIvor readily admitted that it’s simply where his life led him. “I didn’t have a choice,” he said, “but David [Brooks] said that if I wanted to write this I had to tell true stories this time around.” Brooks is MacIvor’s lifelong collaborator, director and dramaturge, one of those fruitful artistic alchemies born of friendship that brings out the best in their work.
On the subject of his writing, MacIvor is voluble. “A classical play creates a kind of energy field that spins out to the audience and connects with them eventually… But a one-person play is a little off-putting to the audience at first, and I like that. It takes a while for them to understand that I’m really addressing them. Sometimes they seem shocked that I’m actually speaking to them. It has a more direct ability to affect you. It allows me the opportunity to be really present. Shows are always happening in the now, that night. I can incorporate the time and environment into the text, and since I’m the writer make any changes I deem fit.”
The play revolves around the pivot of Warren, a gay man struggling with a recent breakup as well as a lifetime of accumulated problems. Like all fiction, it has an oblique relation to autobiography, to real events. “Certainly events are fictionalized, and made more dramatic, but they are rooted in truth,” he muses. “It means that I won’t be able to go to certain cities,” he finishes with a sarcastic laugh. But his struggle with real truth is palpable even in a cursory look at the elements of the play. A character named Will is created from the influence of German idealist philosopher Schopenhauer, who “identified will as a force of ultimate misery in life. I do agree that we are ruled by our cravings and aversions.”
But ultimately he wants the audience to pull from his struggle one lesson. “That forgiveness is paramount and change is possible.”
This Is What Happens Next
Written by Daniel MacIvor
Directed by David Brooks
Co-produced with the Magnetic North Theatre Festival
At Irving Greenberg Theatre (1233 Wellington St. W.)
May 24 to June 12
As seen in the Ottawa XPress, May 19, 2011: http://ottawaxpress.ca/2011/05/19/this-is-what-happens-next-here-and-now/
