In On It by Daniel MacIvor

by Daniel MacIvor

Daniel MacIvor Winner of the 2001 Village Voice OBIE Award. A spiralling narrative about a dying man trying to make plans for the end, a pair of lovers trying to make it work, and two men trying to make a play. A world where accidents happen. A story about control. A play that keeps its options open.

Genres: Plays, Drama

Paperback

First published July 16, 2001

About the author

Daniel MacIvor was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1962. He is a stalwart of the Canadian theatre scene, having written and directed numerous award-winning productions including See Bob Run, Wild Abandon, 2-2-Tango, This Is A Play, The Soldier Dreams, You Are Here, How It Works, A Beautiful View, Communion, Bingo! and his work has been translated into French, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, German and Japanese. From 1987 to 2007 with Sherrie Johnson he ran da da kamera, a respected international touring company which brought his work to Australia, the UK and extensively throughout the US and Canada. With long time collaborator Daniel Brooks, he created the solo performances House, Here Lies Henry, Monster, Cul-de-sac and This is What Happens Next.

Daniel won a GLAAD Award and a Village Voice Obie Award in 2002 for his play In On It, which was presented at PS 122 in New York. His play Marion Bridge received its off-Broadway premiere in New York in October of 2005. In 2006, Daniel received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for his collection of plays I Still Love You. In 2007, his play His Greatness won the Jessie Richardson Award for Best New Play in Vancouver. In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious Siminovitch prize in Theatre.

Also a filmmaker, Daniel has written and directed the feature films Past Perfect, Wilby Wonderful and the short films Permission and Until I Hear From You, and he is the writer of the feature films Trigger, Marion Bridge and co-writer (with Amnon Buchbinder) of Whole New Thing.

Currently, Daniel divides his time between Toronto and Avondale, Nova Scotia and he is playwright in residence at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

Reviews

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

In On It is a play about two men creating a play, more or less before our eyes. Their play is about a man named Ray who, as it commences, is told by his doctor that he doesn't have long to live. The two playwrights enact short scenes about Ray as he struggles to deal with this terrible news. We see him with his son, Miles, who complains bitterly about his disorganized wife and goes immediately into denial when Ray explains how sick he is. We see him with his wife, Brenda, a difficult woman with a bit of a drinking problem, who has news of her own: she is leaving Ray for another man. And we see Ray, finally, with his rival's young stepson, helping him make sense of a world that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Interspersed with these scenes are other scenes in which the collaborators recall moments of their own troubled relationship. We never learn these guys' names, by the way; they're called This One and That One in the script and by each other. We see how the two met, roped into performing a dance routine at a birthday party for a mutual friend; and we watch their relationship blossom, quite by accident, and then mature and sour, petty quarrels about jackets and opera masking rawer emotional truths.

This One and That One also argue about their play--what it means, how it should proceed, how it should end. I leave it to you to find out what they together decide, as well as the stunningly ingenious way that MacIvor tightly wraps loose ends and thematic threads into a startlingly seamless whole.

One more thing: if I've made In On It sound relentlessly somber and serious, then I'm not doing it justice. It's very funny, a lot of the time; and it contains at least one moment of pure, unadorned, joyfulness.