Daniel MacIvor lightens up with a Buddy’s help
Daniel MacIvor, his best friend Buddy, and a new comedy at Backstage Theatre
“Want to meet them? Go see,” says Daniel MacIvor encouragingly to his companion Buddy, pointing out the locals. They’re a long way from home, these two Maritimers, as they walk through Calgary’s river valley last week.
If one of them — the one who isn’t a lithe greyhound — is a little breathless, maybe it’s because he “always has this image of Calgary being flat. But it ain’t!”
The playwright who is Canadian theatre’s reigning monarch of dark ironies, looping narratives and raging obsessives sounds unusually buoyant on the phone. This is partly because it’s the day after the “fantastic” federal election. MacIvor, elated, can’t quite believe he’s found himself inadvertently — a directing gig at the University of Calgary — at the ground zero of Harper’s defeat. A Cape Bretoner by origin, he has spent election night “on the phone with my neighbours in the Annapolis Valley,” where he has a house in the woods. He and Buddy repair there when they’re not in Toronto, where MacIvor has been playwright-inresidence at Tarragon Theatre for the last eight years.
There’s a confluence of unusually sunny factors in his life, as MacIvor genially points out. And the play that launches the Shadow season at the Backstage Theatre Thursday is one tangible result. The Best Brothers is, quite deliberately, a comedy — lighter in palette, more odd-couple in setup, more heartwarming in temperature than you might expect from the much-awarded author of such dark, macabre gems as Here Lies Henry, House, Monster, Cul-De Sac, or family trauma dramas like Marion Bridge.
True, the engine of The Best Brothers is a death. Two antagonistic siblings feud as they make funeral arrangements for their mother, Bunny Best, who met her end in a freak accident at a gay pride parade. Hamilton is an uptight, stiff-backed architect; Kyle is a free-spirited real estate agent whose current boyfriend is a sex worker. As they squabble over the eulogy, and a dog named Enzo, they take turns playing Bunny, each from his own perspective.
MacIvor has created two-handers a-plenty, In On It and Never Swim Alone among them. This one’s different. For one thing, “the others were mostly developed with a team, rehearsed from improv, up on their feet. And this one was written more like a play.”
For another, figuring prominently as a force of friction and reconciliation in the family is a four-pawed “brother,” an Italian greyhound with a bent for pandemonium. Enzo doesn’t appear onstage, but his presence is felt in every scene. Buddy can claim inspiration for that character.
“I’d always carried around the idea of writing a play about two brothers,” says MacIvor, the baby of a family of five. “I have two: one’s a big union guy, one’s management.
It was interesting to watch the tension of different philosophies, and how they somehow managed to make it work.”
Originally MacIvor cast himself as Kyle, “the more whimsical, funloving ” gay brother. “After the first reading people said ‘Hey, you’ve got the roles wrong’!” He sighs, and laughs ruefully. “Tightly wound is in my repertoire, true.” MacIvor switched.
Since its 2012 Stratford première, and a run at Tarragon after that, The Best Brothers has been produced by Canadian theatres across the country, invoking such populist terms of endearment as “audiencefriendly” and “crowd-pleasing.”
Says MacIvor: “I’m fine with that! I’ve had 14 or 15 plays published. One of my first, Never Swim Alone, took 25 years to go into four printings ... Because there was a picture of Buddy on the cover, The Best Brothers had a second printing in six months.”
“The only people who’ve rejected it are people who hate dogs,” MacIvor declares cheerfully. “Dog people adore it. If you love dogs or even if you’re indifferent, you’ll like the play. If you’re a dog hater, don’t bother coming. Really. Honestly. There’s nothing like the outrage of a dog-hater ... I’m not a big fan of outrage generally.”
Clearly, Buddy has had his impact as a theatrical muse and lifestyle coach.
“Something about getting the dog was life-changing for me. You’ve probably heard this from performers before, but in life I’m actually pretty shy. I find it a little difficult to talk to strangers. But with a dog, all that is transformed; a dog mitigates everything, in a truly wonderful way.”
MacIvor didn’t meet his romantic partner walking Buddy. But he might have. As the year-old relationship flourished, though, there came a critical moment: “Things were going really well. ‘And now ... you have to meet the dog!’” He laughs. “It could have been a dealbreaker. Luckily everybody liked everybody.”
“I missed out on the education a child provides,” MacIvor says. “I’m not saying a child and a dog are the same. But there’s this: just because I want the dog to do something doesn’t mean the dog will do it.”
MacIvor will be back in the West after Christmas — at One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo in Calgary — with his new solo touring show Who Killed Spalding Gray? He is an artist who’s been strikingly unafraid to make big changes in his life and art. At times, he’s given up solo performance; sometimes he’s decided to give up on theatre altogether in favour of a “normal” life. He’s been equally unafraid to double back.
He actually drove from Toronto to Calgary, just so Buddy could come.
“Having Buddy has meant that I see what unconditional love is, in a way I never have before. Something to aspire to, something impossible maybe ... but I know there’s such a thing..... It opens one up a bit more to the world. It’s all centred around the heart.”