Daniel MacIvor is no stranger to the West Coast. He has toured one-man shows and even directed a two men show here in the West Coast. Just last year, he performed in the play His Greatness at the Arts Club.
“I like Vancouver,” MacIvor confesses. “I’m from the East Coast. People here call the East Coast Ontario, but there’s no coast in Ontario, so it really isn’t a coast!” MacIvor laughs. “I’m from the actual East Coast—I’m from Nova Scotia, but I’ve lived most of the time in Toronto.”
Ruby Slippers Theatre’s production of MacIvor’s A Beautiful View is, in short, a love story about friendship. “It’s two women, they meet, and kind of just randomly at this camping store in their 20s, and they sort of begin this weird sort of friendship that goes on for 20 years or something, and the play sort of follows that…Their friendship, it has a sexual component that surprises both of them, as neither of them identifies as lesbian.” The two women find themselves in this peculiar situation, which become an ongoing tension in their relationship.
The play was originally done as a commission for Ohio State University, and was written specifically for the actors. “I wrote the play three or four years ago. I directed it at that time with some actors in Toronto and we did a tour.”
The same cast toured the play to South Carolina, Montreal, Ottawa and New York. Soon, MacIvor got calls from Washington and Nova Scotia to direct that same play, only with different actors. “I never really thought of doing it with other people, so I went down, and I did the show with different actors, and I thought, oh, this is very interesting. I didn’t know that [my play] would translate to other actors, because I kind of make it for [the original] actors.”
“So this is now my fourth time directing with different cast, different designers. It’s been really interesting for me because it started off as something I thought was a very specific thing…and it’s grown into being something quite different.”
“In a lot of ways, this play is about labeling,” MacIvor points out. “Why we label, why we feel like we have to label things, like why does someone have to be a lesbian, or gay man, or whatever, you know? We’re so into labels, hyphenating things. Why can’t we just be people? It does ask that question.” Thankfully, there will be humour that will pull you through these pondering questions.”It’s pretty whimsical in some ways in the play, so it’s got a lightness about it, even though it…asks some serious questions, it’s quite light. It’s funny. It has its humour about these questions.”
With a very specific text set to very specific lighting and sound design, fans may not really be able to tell the difference in the cross continental versions. “What changes in this mix, is the different designers and the actors, who are different, bringing themselves into it, altering things. It probably looks the same, but feels different.”
A Beautiful View is one of the five published in MacIvor’s Governer General’s Award-winning collection, I Still Love You. It runs December 4–13 at Performance Works on Granville Island and December 16–19 at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby at 8pm. For more information, got to rubyslippers.ca.
