‘ This show wants to heal’
Daniel MacIvor’s latest reveals a gentleness unseen before
The weekend that f amed monologist Spalding Gray was found dead of an apparent suicide in 2004, the playwright and performer Daniel MacIvor was in California working with a healer/teacher – “One of those California people!” says MacIvor – on his own demons.
Before t hat, Gray and MacIvor had often been compared. MacIvor is well known for his solo performances, and the two were often on the same performance circuit, although they never met in person.
“I would sort of show up maybe a month after he was somewhere, and people would often comment that there was something similar between us,” says MacIvor. “And at the time I didn’t take it as a compliment.”
In MacIvor’s latest show, Who Killed Spalding Gray?, he examines why that was, and how his relationship with Gray and his death have changed over the years.
“When I started to find out a little more about him, and when I read his journals, I realized that we were in fact coming very much from the same sort of obsessions and concerns,” he says.
“And he had been struggling with depression, and I had been struggling with my own issues, and I felt a kinship with him, very intensely. And that’s the period that I speak of in much of the show.”
Who Killed Spalding Gray is one of the most personal pieces of work MacIvor has ever done, and has a “gentleness,” he says, that his previous work lacks.
“It’s very different, this show. It’s not showy in the way that some of the other shows are showy. There’s a kind of gentleness to it that’s not my normal thing. But it feels like a healthy, good thing to be doing.”
He hopes that gentleness will reach the audience. “I would hope that people leave a little softer than they came in, maybe,” he says. “The show wants to heal something.”