IN ON IT by Daniel MacIvor March 26-April 7 at Buddies in Bad Times.
Rating: NNNNN
Whaddya get when you mix two of the hottest, most out-of-the-box thinkers in Canadian theatre? In the case of Daniel MacIvor’s In On It, universal acclaim on an international tour. The hit show confronts the lack of control in our lives, and even in the Big Apple, where the da da kamera production played a month after 9/11, New Yorkers declared the piece both positive and comforting. MacIvor and Darren O’Donnell (White Mice, Boxhead) play a gay couple — the introspective This One and the outgoing That One — who create a play about a gravely ill man, sharing the role, while working on the nature of their own relationship. This is po-mo theatre — complete with an emphasis on the dramatic form, unexpected narrative leaps and cracks in the theatre’s fourth wall — that connects to a deep emotional core in the audience. Last fall, MacIvor’s You Are Here brilliantly unpeeled the onionskin layers of an “ordinary” woman. The stripped-down In On It presents us with two halves of a whole, two men emotionally as well as physically caught in their own spotlights and trying to make sense of what’s accidental and what’s intentional in their world and their relationship. The play may look at the small items of everyday existence, but it does so to point to life’s big questions.
