The Soldier Dreams

by Daniel MacIvor

The Soldier Dreams is a play about love, an examination of the effect of death on the living, and a homage to those we love who have left us. A young man lies dying of AIDS, as his family gathers around.

Genres: Plays, Drama

64 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 1997

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

[Parnian.K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Watched at Douglas College
Nov 12, 2024

[Zen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have yet to pick up The Soldier Dreams print, so I don't know if I should count it as "read", but I saw a small and very heartfelt production of it once and it made me cry my eyes out. I can't imagine that it'd be worth any less than 5 stars to me in its written form, so I'm going to cheat a little and add it to my shelf!

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Soldier Dreams is a play by Daniel MacIvor from the late 1990s. Why is it that Canadian writers like MacIvor remain mostly marginalized in American theatre? This is a sharp, affecting, fever dream of a play, set in at least a couple of alternate universes. One is real-time reality, the place where we spend our waking moments, and in it we see the last days in the life of a young gay man named David who is dying of AIDS, in his own bed but hooked up to an IV, attended by a nurse and his four closest family members. The other location is inside David's head, and just possibly inside the heads of the others on death watch as well. These people include David's lover, Richard; his two sisters, Tish (older than him) and Judy (younger); and Tish's husband, Sam. All--David included--agree that David would rather everyone were dancing, not grimly hovering over his deathbed. And all--again, David included--are soliloquizing, having what a few of them call "moments for David," making sense of a life or, more accurately, what that life meant to them. MacIvor shows us a family with a capacity for caring and understanding no larger or smaller than yours or mine--and exposes the sad, lonely fact that none of us ever knows anyone except ourselves.

So all the "moments for David" are actually about the others. Tish and Richard each fancies her/himself chief mourner; the grudge they've been nursing against one another for years gets exposed in the course of the play, with surprising results. Judy wants to mourn in her own eccentric way. Sam retreats into his journal. Tish wants to make Jell-O. Tish and Judy want to know what happened to the carpet mom promised to them. And everybody wants to know what the unconscious David means when he utters the words "matchbook," "Ottawa," and "German doctor."

MacIvor is masterful as he doles out the bits of David's life—to us and to his characters—making it clear that whatever the medium, there is no way to capture the totality or even a tiny part of another human being. Even the truth that David himself tries to tell us—a story about a student whom he met the night before Tish and Sam's wedding—is elusive, fragmentary, incomplete. Before he can finish, his "real" self has disappeared (without our even noticing), and even what he knew about what he was trying to tell us remains finally unknown and unknowable.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the right director, this could be a brilliant short. MacIvor leaves much to the director's imagination. So much so, that there are times when characters enter and exit without notation. The director has to choose where to put her/his/their chess pieces. The AIDS topic (like Rent) doesn't have the same power it had 20 years ago, but the human condition is universal if a director does things right.