Nov. 16, 2011 - Issue #839: Ox

Back in black

Daniel MacIvor returns with This Is What Happens Next

Sat, Nov. 12 – Sun, Dec. 4 (7:30 pm, Sunday matinees 2 pm)
Written and performed by Daniel MacIvor
Directed by Daniel Brooks
Citadel Theatre, $20 – $61.75

There's a certain set of distinct characteristics in a Daniel MacIvor show. Dark humour? Definitely. Dysfunctional characters? Check. Simultaneously breaking down and bricking up the fourth wall? You bet. A happy ending? Not so much.
But MacIvor assures us that his new work, This is What Happens Next, does indeed have a happy ending. "I defy you to find me a happier ending," he says, pausing a moment before adding, "But one has to pay a price for happy endings."
That ominous postscript confirms that this is not an anomaly in his much-lauded career. A master of the solo performance, MacIvor has penned and performed a number of shows dwelling on recurring themes, which are invariably dark: addiction, family dysfunction and death, to name but a few.
"It's what I know," says MacIvor, with an air of wry resignation. "It's my particular, personal résumé. It's what I lived, so it's the filters through which I experience life on earth."
Five years ago, MacIvor publicly called it quits on performing. He was burned out from too many years of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle, performing in several solo shows at once and spending too much time on the road.
Yet his break didn't exactly go as planned, and after his attempt to "go get a real life" ended in disaster, MacIvor contacted longtime collaborator Daniel Brooks and began work on a new solo show.
Perhaps more than an inability to live a "normal" life, MacIvor's return to performing was an unavoidable consequence of his creative process. "I start on my feet, with notes, and Brooks interrogates me," he explains. "I take on the voice of a character, and I'm not even sure the details of the character when I start. It's not until into that process that I start developing what one might think of as a script."

MacIvor has a knack for employing direct address in an unusual manner. He often acknowledges and addresses the audience directly, but in so doing the audience becomes another character; the fourth wall is broken, yet there's a persistent distance between the guy on stage and the people in the crowd.
"We actually call the character 'Me,'" states MacIvor. "It's me, and he's speaking to the audience as the people in the room tonight. But there's also a level, another level, a storytelling level.
"It started off as an exploration of what storytelling was, and what its importance was, and what the pros and cons of storytelling were," he continues, "and then developed from that, over the course of a number of workshops, into a play about the nature of will, of willfulness, and I guess the difference between willfulness and willingness. And in the midst of all that there's an actual story that's told, about a kid, a seven-year-old kid, and his dad and various things that happen to him. And there's a giant in it."
The title of This is What Happens Next is as much a reference to the anatomy of storytelling as it is an allusion to MacIvor's own life. It is also, as he goes on to explain, a kind of treatise on the notion of time itself.
"If one is making an effort to be present, and live in the moment, then storytelling becomes a problem," states MacIvor. "Storytelling isn't really about the moment, the now; storytelling is about the next. So one always has to be always thinking ahead to the next in order to tell stories.
"The idea of This and Next are really important ideas inside the show," he continues. "The Next somehow qualifies This, and makes This impossible, because we're always thinking of Next."
  vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus