Theatre with an urban edge
Playwright Daniel MacIvor points an angry pen at the moral decline of the city that made him famous
Daniel MacIvor is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.
“Whoever is writing that Big Script up there in the sky has no dramaturge, or he’s lazy or he’s cruel,” rants MacIvor with a venom worthy of Network’s Howard Beale.
It’s definitely not the kinder, gentler MacIvor we’ve grown accustomed to in recent years, whose latest script, Cake and Dirt, gets its official opening on Wednesday at the Tarragon Theatre.
“Look, I don’t mean to diminish the work I’ve been doing lately. Sure, I’ve written my Norm Foster play, my middle-aged love play, my play about a dog and they were all kind of warm and fuzzy, but now I’m just a bit pissed off.”
And what’s caused this turnaround in one of our country’s most prolific and talented authors? Blame it on the city.
“I’ve been working on being Zen for the last seven years. And it’s great when I’m out in the woods in Nova Scotia with my fog and my trees with a driveway that puts half a kilometre between me and the rest of the world,” he says.
“But when you get out there in the world, especially in a big city like Toron- to, it can be pretty f---ing annoying.”
The 52-year-old MacIvor, born in Cape Breton, N.S., became famous in Toronto in the late 1980s and ’90s and he looks fondly back on the city as it used to be.
“When I came to Toronto back then, it was Jane Jacobs, it was Richard Florida, it was a great place!
“Now it’s a city where people are being charged $400,000 for 400 square feet with no view and it’s becoming a haven for the mega-rich. What kind of a nightmare has it turned into here?”
That’s the question that led MacIvor to the “dark comedy” he’s about to open at Tarragon.
“It centres around the 50th birthday of Jeff Thomas, a corporate lawyer. His ex- wife is throwing the party at her downtown condo. Then there’s the new wife; the somewhat troubled 25-year-old daughter; the nanny/maid.
“They’re all in the kitchen drinking everything that’s left, when in comes a city councillor who’s very much in the mode of the new Toronto.
“He likes his girls, he likes his drugs and he’s flipped his vote on a neighbourhood park so it can be developed.”
Possibly provocative, but a bit conventional sounding for MacIvor, until he starts flinging curveballs at us.
“The play starts with the aftermath of the party,” he says.
“We see the next day first and then we see the party that led to all of the trouble and the breakdown of several different relationships simultaneously.
“I’m always looking for a good, dark laugh, or a sardonic turn of events, and there’s a lot of that here. I said to the actors early on, ‘Your impulse will be to show us your many varied sides as a character, but that’s not what’s happening here. These are awful people on bad days.’ ”
Realizing he may have made it all sound too grim, he quickly adds, “But there’s jokes. Of course there’s jokes. Why would I want to spend 90 minutes with these people without getting off a lot of good laughs before I go?”
If all this sounds like a Gotterdammerung of sorts for MacIvor, you’d be right, because he intends to see that his last play as writer-in-residence at Tarragon makes a big splash.
“This is the end of a chapter for me. This is the end of me specifically be- ing a playwright. I’ve explored every genre I wanted to: the low comedy, the romantic play, the memory play — it was all very interesting,” MacIvor says.
“Tarragon has been warm and wonderful and welcoming to me, but it’s time for me to go. Just like you leave your parents.”
So MacIvor has set up a new theatre company called ReWork, “with myself as the benevolent tyrant.”
The goal is to go to “go back to the idea that design and performance and text and marketing are all essential works in the creation of a show.
It feels efficient and the inefficiency of many theatres drives me crazy sometimes.”
So there stands Daniel MacIvor on the edge of yet another new career.
“I feel happy,” he says. “Because it’s all about work. And that’s when I’m most content.” Cake and Dirt runs in the main space at Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave., until April 12. Call 416-531-1827 for tickets or go to tarragontheatre.com.