Daniel MacIvor was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1962 and has written numerous award winning plays.Guntar Kravis/Supplied
“There’s the joke that giving someone a puppy is giving the gift of sadness.”
Daniel MacIvor, groundbreaking experimental Canadian playwright and performer, tilts his camera to show me Buddy the greyhound, who is curled up in a doughnut bed beside his desk.
“That’s a 14-year-old dog having a snooze over there. I keep saying ‘just not this year, just make it to Christmas.’” He laughs. Buddy twitches an ear in his direction.
We are talking about grief, a current which runs through many of MacIvor’s solo works. These plays, most often performed by MacIvor himself, were the heart of a decades-long partnership with director Daniel Brooks. Brooks died in May at age 64.
“Losing Daniel and coming into this moment has given me pause in terms of what it is to have lost a partner, someone you walk with. What is that idea, ‘hope is a thing with feathers?’ Well, maybe grief is a thing with feathers.”
At this moment, two plays that were emblematic of MacIvor’s partnership with Brooks, Monster, and Here Lies Henry, are being presented at Factory Theatre in a double bill as part of artistic director Mel Hague’s first season.
“Programming those shows was almost selfish,” Hague says. “They mean a lot to me. They shifted the way I thought about theatre. I saw them when I was 19 and believed I was the smartest person in the room. For the first time ever I wasn’t analyzing the work – I felt like a real audience member.”
To be an audience member at a MacIvor play is to have a deeply personal experience while sitting in a room with dozens of other people also having deeply personal experiences.
In both plays, the actor addresses the audience directly, confessing, begging, and occasionally berating the audience. Fluid narratives weave stories of obsession, desperation, and violence. All the while, a dark humour punches holes through the horror, infusing performances with buzzing urgency. These are the feelings we’re not supposed to have, but they’re the feelings those who work with MacIvor’s texts hope audiences will indulge.
“We can conjure the demon in a dark room together and have a real encounter,” says actor Karl Ang, who plays Adam in Monster, “and then the lights come up and we’re just together in a room again.”
The process of engaging with such dark themes felt personal to Monster director Soheil Parsa. “We all have the potential for evil, if we’re not taking care of ourselves,” he said. “Karl and I spent hours doing table work and talking about our connection with the material. It wasn’t an easy one.”
When I ask MacIvor if he thinks the work of living is in managing our darkness, he says that yes, “it does have a tendency to run things.” But he believes the real work of living is to be present in the truest way one possibly can be. That is what’s so attractive about theatre.
“Theatre insists that you be in the moment. We’re all breathing together and sharing something. The audience, but also the performer. All that incredibly rigorous planning and intellectual thinking through, all that work, and you still free-fall into the moment. That’s what performance feels like. Theatre is the church of the moment.”
MacIvor reflects on how he became a member of this church. “I grew up in a house that had two books in it: a dictionary and a bible. And the dictionary was only ever opened during an argument. There was nothing. Education wasn’t important. I was a sort of moody and effeminate child and so my grandmother determined I would be a priest.”
But when an 8th grade teacher scrawled “you have talent” on a piece of MacIvor’s school writing, a doorway to another life opened. MacIvor first imagined himself as a journalist, because journalism was something he knew he could go away to study.
“Then, through a series of weird events, I fell into the theatre department and that was that. I stepped out on stage one night and I knew it was where I needed to be. It wasn’t about a job, it was about how to live and engage with the world.”
Tawiah Ben M’Carthy, director of Here Lies Henry, agrees, “I think that’s what we try to do with theatre, we try to share what we understand of ourselves, of life, we try to share truth onstage.” M’Carthy believes that in Here Lies Henry, a truth about hope is revealed through its exploration of death.
“Most people go through their lives not thinking about death. There’s a fear. If you actually know and understand that it’s just a part of living, that takes the fear away. Hope exists in understanding that whatever the challenge of living, there will eventually be an end.”
MacIvor is creating a new solo work at Factory, which will be read in December. His dramaturgical partner is Brooks’s daughter Kate. “It wasn’t just about having a Brooks in the room. We work really well together – she challenges me. And I just know how much Daniel would love it. Well, he’d love it and be annoyed by it in exactly the right way.”
The new play is called Your Show Here, a title MacIvor said Brooks gave him in a dream.
“The thing about Monster and Here Lies Henry is that all the work Daniel did is still there. His effect is present. To me, it doesn’t feel like these shows are being done without him. Listen, on the night, in the moment, when I’m sitting in the audience, who knows what I’m going to feel. But he’s not absent.”
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