✭✭✭✭✭

written and directed by Daniel MacIvor

da da kamera, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

May 22-31, 2003

The latest play by Daniels MacIvor and Brooks is like drinking too much warm sake at dinner.  It seems so smooth and comforting but at the end you'll find your legs weak and the room spinning.  Anyone familiar with MacIvor's work and seeing "dead end" in the title should hardly expect a warm, cuddly show.  Yet, that's just how the hour feels until its final 15 minutes.  Then we realize that beneath humorous portraits of five households around a cul-de-sac a seeping horror has been spreading despite our laughter.

Our tour guide through this miniature Our Town is a funny young gay man named Leonard.  One by one Kimberly Purtell 's beautiful, precise lighting signals each house as MacIvor shifts voice and gesture to portray each inhabitant.  There are Joy and Eddie, quarrelling Maritimers whose sex life has ended.  There's the retired veterinarian Bick Bickerson, whose fondest memory is of putting down cats and feeling their life ebb away.  Virginia and Samuel are the snooty neighbours with a penchant for G&S and meddling in other's lives like Leonard's.  Leonard's only friend is the young girl Madison, whose book "The Balsa Wood Astronaut" could be his life story.  In a tour-de-force of acting, MacIvor plays all of them together at a Christmas party, where Leonard's penultimate humiliation occurs.  Contrasting with the genteel violence of his neighbours is the overt danger of the one outsider, Eric, a demon fueled by drugs and his own past humiliation.

The lighting, Richard Feren's sound design and MacIvor's gestures blend seamlessly.  What is that low moaning sound Leonard describes so lyrically, the one everyone heard the night he died but did nothing about, the one that seems to sum up the underlying pain of everyone living in this dead end?  When you find out, you'll ask, as the play seems to, "Why is life like this?"

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-05-29.

Photo: Daniel MacIvor. ©2003 Guntar Kravis.