Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✭✭✭
written and directed by Daniel MacIvor
da da kamera, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
March 26-April 7, 2002
"Shared Brilliance"
A scene in Daniel MacIvor’s “In On It” gave me an intellectual shiver. MacIvor and Darren O’Donnell, as characters called This One and That One, have agreed to go to a performance piece by one of That One’s friends. They are told to enter from the back door and sit on the only two seats available. When the lights come up in a space exactly like the completely bare Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, they find they are facing an audience--they are the performance. In re-enacting that past fictional event they are simultaneously our present real event. The simplicity with which MacIvor demonstrates this fundamental paradox of the theatre is thrilling. MacIvor and O’Donnell allow the moment to sink in so when one of them speaks in character it comes as a shock. When the two finally retreat from the chairs we see what was a real space suddenly become fictional right before our eyes. This one moment sums up the method and impact of this brilliant play.
“In On It” arrives in Toronto already having received great acclaim from audiences in Antigonish, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, Washington and Calgary to Vancouver where it had its premiere in 2001. Further acclaim followed in Montreal, Amsterdam and New York. Though Toronto is late in its touring schedule, we should feel lucky that this play has been such an ambassador for Canadian drama.
In the mandate for his company, da da kamera, MacIvor says he wants to focus on “the essential connection: the clear and simple exchange of energy between the performer and the audience”. In the 75-minute show everything is reduced to the basics. There is no set. The only props are the two chairs and a lamb’s wool jacket. Aided only by Richard Feren’s vivid sound design and Kimberly Purtell’s precise squares of light, MacIvor and O’Donnell tell a tale with more precision and more resonance than innumerable plays twice its length.
It is a play about loss made vibrant through a presentation where the action exists on several intersecting planes. We see This One and That One rehearsing a play that This One has written and That One will act in. We see flashbacks into their relationship, when they met, the few times they were “not unhappy”, the moments before That One left and never returned. We see scenes from This One’s play about a man named Raymond King, obsessed with bad news he’s heard from the doctor and faced with his wife’s leaving him for the married man next door. As This One and That One rehearse both play, among others, Ray, his wife Brenda and the neighbour kid Lloyd as they compete in finding the best interpretation of these characters.
Episodes from these planes of action are linked associatively so that much of the excitement from watching comes not merely from the content but from our constantly having to reconstruct the chronology and reassess the relation of one episode to the next. There is another fictional plane on which the actions coexist but since it does not become clear until the play’s final minutes, I will not reveal it here. Nevertheless, like Beckett, the ultimate place where the action occurs is in the theatre, something the actors/characters make clear through acknowledging the audience in various ways. That’s why when the fictional plane of the play intersects with the real plane of the performance per se it causes such a thrill.
Honed as they have been before many different audiences, the direction and performances are models of precision. The pacing of the play that moves forward through a series of juxtapositions, is immaculate, making each episode in turn a surprise. The acting of MacIvor and O’Donnell is superb. They are opposites—Mr. Lady Di versus Mr. Noam Chomsky, opera versus pop—who, as a duo, have become one. They can shift a mood from heart-wrenching to hilarious in a moment. They allow us to see the personalities of This One and That One shine through the various personae they take on giving us the threefold view of actors playing actors playing characters. When the two play the same role we compare and contrast the performances even as we become engaged in the story.
This is metatheatricality that is not merely playful but also inquires deeply into the nature of identity, memory and the fictions we use to construct reality. The play is like the recurrent image of flipping through channels on a car radio and settling on one. It is as if there are several co-existing ways of being or thinking among which we have to choose. The play itself has three successive ending endings which complement rather than negate each other.
This is a play where every word, every image, every gesture counts. Ray tells Lloyd that he’s in the centre and when you’re in the centre you can’t see the circle and seeing the circle is what counts. By requiring the audience actively to reconstruct the action as it watches it, MacIvor’s play presents us with a circle of which we are part. If theatre is a shared experience, he makes sure we’re “In On It”. Don’t miss it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in theatreWorld (UK) 2002-03-30.
Photo: Daniel MacIvor and Darren O’Donnell. ©2002 Bruce Edwards.
2002-03-30
In On It