Two Daniels collaborate to conjure the dead
Daniel Brooks and Daniel MacIvor bring Who Killed Spalding Gray back to the Toronto stage
As Daniel MacIvor tells it, a lot of the shows he has done in his celebrated collaborations with Daniel Brooks were “exorcisms.”
The pair have worked together on several solo shows performed by MacIvor since the early 1990s, including Here Lies Henry, House, Cul de Sac and
Monster. Darkly comic fictions that toyed with audiences’ perceptions of truth and with the limits of representation, the shows were highly acclaimed and toured internationally.
But their latest, says MacIvor, “is a conjuring . . . I’m conjuring Spalding and maybe his disquiet. Or the place where he was most uncomfortable.”
The Spalding in question is Spalding Gray, the American monologist who killed himself in January 2004.
Who Killed Spalding Gray? represents a departure from MacIvor’s and Brooks’ previous work on two fronts.
It involves a third collaborator, the dramaturge Iris Turcott
And, in it, MacIvor mostly plays himself rather than a fictional character.
It grew out of a story MacIvor told Turcott and some other colleagues a few years ago about the unusual circumstances in which MacIvor found himself when Gray went missing in 2004.
MacIvor was in California pursuing the services of a spiritual healer and in a state of intense self-examination.
“It’s an attempt at a less mediated relationship . . . less mediated by character, story, so that’s he’s exploring a slightly more — I hesitate to use the word vulnerable.” DANIEL BROOKS ON DANIEL MACIVOR’S PERFORMANCE
In the evenings he would switch on the TV and follow the unfolding drama around Gray, whose body was eventually found in the East River.
“When I told that story in rehearsal one day, I said, ‘Oh my God, I killed Spalding Gray’ . . . and Iris said, ‘There’s your title.’ That didn’t end up feeling exactly like the right title, but it came close. So the beginning was my perceived culpability.”
MacIvor performs the show partly in Gray’s signature style, sitting alone at a table and addressing the audience directly, though Brooks has him move around the stage more than Gray ever did.
The narrative weaves together a number of strands: MacIvor in California with the spiritual healer, a fictional yarn about a man named Howard who’s trying to commit suicide, and MacIvor’s musings about the circumstances that led Gray to end his life.
As for the part about “conjuring,” Brooks says MacIvor is “also conjuring a different relationship with the audience. It’s an attempt at a less mediated relationship . . . less mediated by character, story, so that he’s exploring a slightly more — I hesitate to use the word vulnerable . . .”
“Let’s use the word tender,” MacIvor says. “It’s tenderer.”
Before this, MacIvor’s and Brooks’ most recent collaboration was the solo show This Is What Happens Next in 2010, given a four-star review by the Star for its “unapologetic honesty.”
The appearance of that show was something of a surprise, given that MacIvor swore in the early 2000s never to do another solo show.
So how do they come together on these projects? “We have this ongoing thing in our relationship,” MacIvor says. “It’s kind of an emotional calendar of events. It’s time to do another solo show.”
When they met for this interview at a College St. coffee shop, it had been some time since they’d seen each other. The two have pursued separate careers as independent artists and artistic directors of theatre companies. And MacIvor, originally from Sydney, N.S., lives part-time in Halifax.
The old friends greeted each other with warmth and ease. The dynamic between them is quietly entertaining: MacIvor is verbose and emotional; Brooks a thoughtful, sardonic voice of reason.
Brooks had a passing (and very New York) acquaintance with Spalding Gray when both men were living there in the mid-1980s: “I was going to acting school at the time and I would ride the subway with him. I think he had some kind of shrink appointment uptown.”
The productions that Gray created with the Soho-based Wooster Group were very influential on the work Brooks was doing at the time with the Augusta Company, he says. “And it was through that work that I met
“It’s kind of an emotional calendar of events. It’s time to do another solo show.” DANIEL MACIVOR ON HOW HE AND DANIEL BROOKS WORKED TOGETHER AGAIN
Daniel.”
MacIvor laughs. “It’s so interesting that your experience of Spalding was so in the world and mine was so in myself. Typical!”
MacIvor grew used to people comparing his monologues to those of Gray, though initially he “didn’t see the comparison . . . then later, when I read (Gray’s) journals, I started to understand that we had similar obsessions.”
For Brooks, the questions that Gray’s practice raised about seeming to “strip away all the artifice . . . when in fact there’s loads of artifice” resonate in the current political moment: “I won’t say there’s a direct line between him and Donald Trump . . . but it’s that so-called idea of reality. It’s a performance of reality.”
Who Killed Spalding Gray? premiered in Halifax in June 2014 and played short runs at the 2015 Luminato Festival in Toronto and Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo in January.
On Sept. 22, Turcott died of cancer. A beautiful tribute MacIvor wrote about her in Now magazine circulated widely in theatre circles. He becomes briefly overwhelmed when talking about her.
“Iris was an ally in a different kind of way,” he says. “I always believed that my talent was intuitive and Daniel is more practical than I am. So this show, what was great about it was that he would talk about specifics and she would talk about, ‘I can see Spalding in there!’ ”
“I think she always saw herself as a kind of medium,” Brooks says. “She was a kind of angel that people could pass through along their way to somewhere . . . she just carried that identity.” Who Killed Spalding Gray? plays Wednesday to Dec. 11 at Berkeley Street Downstairs Theatre, 26 Berkeley St. See canadianstage.com for information.