Playwright explores the nature of humanity with new monologues

The iconic award-winning Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor makes no bones about animals.

“Two legs are good. Four legs are better,” he chuckles, referring to his dog in a recent telephone interview with the Gazette.

One of the playwrights-in-residence for Toronto’s experimental Tarragon Theatre, MacIvor is in Edmonton rehearsing his one-man show, This Is What Happens Next, due to open at the Citadel Theatre on Saturday, Nov. 12.

But the Gazette interview was less about pets and more about his upcoming new script. Still in the developmental stage, I, Animal, receives its premiere reading at St. Albert’s Arden Theatre on Monday, Nov. 7 as part of the On-Stage Series.

I, Animal is a new trilogy of monologues that asks what it means to be human. The monologues introduce Man in Scrubs, a male nurse in a park; Woman in Prada, a woman in her early sixties that has just left a tumultuous relationship and finally Boy in Hoodie, a look at a teenage boy standing outside the house of a girl he has a crush on.

MacIvor explains that within the script’s past 12 hours, each of the characters has come out of a situation that has left them “gobsmacked. They experienced a great shock and surprise. That raises up the fight or flight mechanism.”

Since fight or flight is a basic animal instinct, the characters all draw upon an animal to get them through their survival. The man looks to his dog. The woman digs into the recesses of her memory for a beautiful childhood horse, and the teenage boy has a story about cats.

“Each of the characters has felt abandoned and misunderstood and this is an opportunity to see the animal inside,” MacIvor said.

In past works such as Communion, Marion Bridge, A Beautiful View and Never Swim Alone, possibly MacIvor’s greatest achievement is taking humanity’s social issues and transforming them to flesh-and-blood characters that audiences embrace wholeheartedly.

“We humans live in and embrace an artificial world, but something connects all of us and there’s that something that makes us human,” he said. “We get bogged down in personality, in a baggage of words instead of acknowledging something that is alive in all of us, and it’s the same thing in all of us.”

Since MacIvor’s upcoming Arden show is a staged reading, a question-and-answer period will follow.

“I’d like to make it a conversation about the process and why I love theatre. It’s an opportunity to re-enter the piece, talk about the process and demystify the story,” he said.

This presentation is a special partnership with Theatre Alberta and Alberta Playwrights Network. For more information visit www.ardentheatre.com.