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written and directed by Daniel MacIvor

da da kamera, Theatre Passe-Muraille, Toronto

September 20-October 7, 2001

"You Are in the Audience"

Daniel MacIvor’s new play “You Are Here” is like a bizarre cross between Samuel Beckett and Danielle Steele.  Set among the infidelities of movie directors, starlets and magazine writers, this da da kamera production aims to demonstrate man’s essential aloneness, but the artifice of the melodramatic plot compromises the seriousness of the play’s intent.  Fortunately, MacIvor’s chaste direction and the committed performances of the cast give the play its power and resonance.

The play begins when Caroline Gillis playing a character named Alison walks onstage and sets about, apparently, to tell the story of how the idealism of youth has led only to disappointment.  The one thing she would save from a burning house is a bottle of sand from near the Dead Sea that her father gave her, a symbol of the sweat and blood of human effort in ancient times that by the end of the play comes to represent the memories of accumulated effort in a single human being.  As Alison awkwardly tries to tell her tale, the characters involved in it suddenly begin appearing even when she does not want them to.  Gradually she loses any narratorial control as the story tells itself and Alison has to relive increasingly more painful scenes from her life. 

The first act ends after the first major tragedy in her life.  Then her lifelong friend Richard suggests she needs a break and she in direct address tells us that we will have a break.  The play is thus constantly aware of itself as a play.  It is rather like “Six Characters in Search of an Author” except that it begins with the author, who is also one of the characters and cannot control the action.  We the audience take the place of Pirandello’s theatre company. 

After intermission the reminders of theatre as theatre and story as story unfortunately become fewer as MacIvor is forced to detail Alison’s further degradation where every step she takes to achieve something has the consequence of making her lose everything she cares about until, rather unbelievably, she sinks into heroin addiction.  Much of what drives the complications of Act 2 is MacIvor’s desire to work out the plot’s symbolic symmetry--a failed pregnancy is paralleled with a successful one, Alison and her husband Jerry trade partners with the movie director Thomas Roman and the movie star Diane Briss, Alison in an afterlife (real or imagined?) is reconciled with her archrival from university Connie Hoy.  While this is theoretically interesting, Act 2 is less effective than Act 1 because symbolism not realism has motivated the twists in plot.

It’s hard to miss, since MacIvor underscores it four time in a row, that the play is an elaboration of the Hindu notion of “atman”.  In Vedantic philosophy the adept is meant to realize that there is no distinction between what you are, what you see and what sees you and it.  This is summarized by the Sanskrit statement “Tam tvam asi” or “You are that”--that is your soul is the same as the world soul.  Alison had found the maps in malls comforting that state “You are here” as if someone were watching and protecting her.  The play starts with the notion that watching is alienating.  Alison covers society parties for her magazine but is not part of them.  Her husband Jerry is a psychologist who feels he only observes but cannot cure his clients.  The introduction of film people continues the metaphor of distancing through watching.  And, of course, this metaphor is relates to us the audience as we watch this self-conscious play and narrator.  Then at the end, rather too hastily, MacIvor makes the point that while watching can be perceived as distancing, it can from another point of view be seen as the link that ultimately defines how we as individuals can be both separate and united. 

What keeps MacIvor’s melodramatic plot within bounds is his minimalist direction.  Designer Andy Moro has covered the new proscenium at Theatre Passe-Muraille entirely in black leaving only a square opening for a bare stage with one chair as the only decoration for the majority of the action.  Moro’s lighting is often quite dim in order to fix a character in a bright square of light and thus reinforce the theme of isolation within a void.  MacIvor’s minimalism endows any additional prop, a glass of beet juice or Alison’s bottle of sand, with multiple meanings.  MacIvor draws excellent performances from the cast who maintain a clear emotional throughline despite the fragmentary way the story is presented.

MacIvor wrote the play for Caroline Gillis, who created the title role in his earlier work “See Bob Run”.  She is wonderful as Alison, showing warmth and intelligence behind her initial awkwardness, the pain of hindsight in reliving a past experience, her self-irony gradually shading into self-hatred.  She seems visibly to age before us as the story progresses.  Jim Allodi is Alison’s confused university roommate Richard.  He is the comic parallel to Alison, construing his inability to make a decision as a type of freedom where in fact not committing to anything results in his accomplishing nothing.  

There is fine work from the rest of the cast--David Jansen as Alison’s depressed psychologist husband who thinks of love as a cage, Fiona Highet as the  star whose bimboish behaviour belies her integrity and Randy Hughson as the art film director who has sold out to Hollywood.  Marjorie Chan plays the youthful then aged Connie Hoy, who Alison has always hated for knowing exactly what she wanted and getting it.  Allan Hawco plays a compromised Christian actor and later Alison’s violent drug-dealing “assistant”.  Ryan McVittie has three roles, most notably the laid-back professor both Alison and Connie are after.

On the whole, “You Are Here” struck me as MacIvor reinventing the wheel since Beckett’s short 1963 play called “Play” covers so many of the same themes--watching, play as play, individuals isolated but related, infidelity, repetition as punishment--in a form much more elegant and compact.  Yet, this is an important work in MacIvor’s oeuvre as a link between the one-person show and the ensemble piece.  There is no doubt about the talent and seriousness of the thought behind it.  But most people will find that for a postmodern minimalist MacIvor, in this case, achieves his end by overelaborate means.

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Caroline Gillis. ©2013 Fernando Morales.