Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by Daniel MacIvor, directed by Ed Roy
independent Artists Repertory Theatre, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
September 22-October 23, 2011
“Blow Out Your Candles, Laura”
Daniel MacIvor’s 2007 play, His Greatness, only now having its Toronto premiere, marks a major change in style for MacIvor and will intrigue his many fans for that very reason. In conception and execution it is deliberately old-fashioned and, unlike any previous MacIvor play, features an historical character. Its subtitle is, “A potentially true story about the playwright Tennessee Williams”.
The background to the play involves Tennessee Williams’ stay in Vancouver as a Writer in Residence at the University of British Columbia in 1980. MacIvor sets the play in the hotel room where Williams is staying at a time just before and after the Vancouver premiere of his revision of his play The Red Devil Battery Sign that had opened in Boston in 1975 to scathing reviews. There, a man known only as “Assistant” (Daniel MacIvor), who has been Williams’ personal secretary-cum-nurse-cum valet for fifteen years, tries to rouse the “Playwright” (Richard Donat) from yet another alcohol-induced stupor to face the day. One of the Assistant’s duties is to procure a Young Man (Greg Gale) to escort the Playwright to the premiere and to entertain him afterwards.
One enters the Factory Studio Theatre to discover one of the most expensive-looking naturalistic sets ever seen there. Kimberley Purtell, also the lighting designer, has created a remarkable facsimile of an upscale yet slightly worn hotel room somewhere not unlike the Hotel Vancouver. Though known for her expressionistic light for other directors, here Purtell notes with exquisite precision the progress of the daylight penetrating the room through a large window and the effect of the various small lamps inside the room.
Such detailed naturalism is, of course, quite unnecessary in MacIvor’s other plays, many of which require only a bare stage. MacIvor’s purpose is to write a play about Williams in the style of one of Williams’ own plays. The play begins and concludes with the Assistant directly addressing the audience--first to set the time and place of the action, then to tell us what happens after the events of the play.
The relation of the action to Williams’ The Glass Menagerie is confirmed when we hear the assistant’s first words to the sleeping Playwright, “Rise and shine! Rise and Shine!” Those the words Amanda Wingfield uses to wake her son Tom. The near-plotlessness of MacIvor’s play gains resonance through the strange ways it reflects Williams’ first big success. The Assistant is like the practical sides of both Tom and Amanda, determined to keep the household running smoothly despite the recalcitrance of its main inhabitant. The Playwright is like the genteel southern belle still inside Amanda and like asocial Laura, drifting farther away from contact with the outside world. As in The Glass Menagerie, the Assistant has to procure a perverse equivalent to the Gentleman Caller for his helpless Laura. Unlike Jim, this Young Man is hardly clean living, but both have hopes of one day breaking into mass media--Jim into television, the Young Man into porn. The Glass Menagerie also provides a template for understanding the ending of MacIvor’s play.
Donat gives a magnificent performance as the Playwright. He does have a special insight into the character and the situation since he played the male lead, King Del Rey, in the 1980 premiere of Williams’ play and rehearsed in his presence. He presents the Playwright as a wreck of man--grand and grandiloquent when he has get himself together, otherwise by turns childish, cowardly, effeminate, belligerent, fearful, foolish, charming. Donat blends all these quicksilver changes into a unified Falstaffian personality.
As the Young Man, Gale gives us a kind of worldly innocent. He may know all about sex and drugs but of large swaths of human life he’s completely ignorant. The fact that he’s 28 pretending to be 21 shows an underlying sense of insecurity since he realizes he’s reaching his best by date in the hustling market without a backup plan for what to do next. Gale communicates the Young Man’s attempts to cover up his fear with touchingly transparent bravado. His Newfoundland accent shows he’s as out of place in BC as the Playwright and assistant. He gives the Young Man’s late bid to usurp the Assistant’s place just the right degree of menace, just enough to collapse when the Assistant explains the rigors of the job.
MacIvor has strangely written himself the least interesting role. For someone who has widened so much what can be considered a gay play, it’s amusing to see MacIvor take on the caricatured part of the prissy, nannyish minder. We see how the relationship between the Assistant and the Playwright must have begun, but it is less clear why precisely now this relationship is going to end. MacIvor acts as if the Assistant has become totally inured to the steady stream of insults thrown his way by the Playwright, and when the Young man suggests various scenarios for what might happen that night, the Assistant assures him he’s seen it all before. What does not come out either in the play or in MacIvor’s performance is that the Assistant, who says he has seen worse than this, is actually reaching a breaking point. We assume, incorrectly, that he has becomes used to thankless service and maintains a routine for its own sake.
Unlike MacIvor’s other plays, His Greatness does not burst with mounting tension. Rather it is an elegiac study of three men at the end of an age. At first you think the title refers to the Playwright, but MacIvor also applies it ironically to the other two men. The play’s abundant humour makes the action all seem rather more pleasant than it actually is. Only after the play is over does the real sadness of the three men begin to haunt you and you see them as three lonely individuals each finding his own way of confronting despair. When that happens, you realize, “Why, yes, of course, this is a play by Daniel MacIvor.”
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Daniel MacIvor and Richard Donat. ©2011 Seán Baker.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2011-09-26
His Greatness