Written and Performed by Daniel MacIvor
Directed by Daniel Brooks
The Canadian Stage Company Presents
 A Necessary Angel’s Production
at the Berkeley Street Theatre
April 12 –May 8, 2010

   Daniel MacIvor could probably make the Toronto phone book sound interesting. He certainly manages to keep his audience involved during his new 80-minute solo, though he doesn’t pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. This Is What Happens Next, sharply written and performed by him, with the help of Daniel Brooks’s direction, and the expert lighting of Kimberly Purtell and the intriguing sound design of Richard Feren can’t disguise the fact that it is not MacIvor’s best work. Its conventions show all too plainly, though MacIvor works hard at making them seem spontaneous and fresh. The show begins with his late arrival on stage, purportedly because of misadventures at a local Starbuck’s. His anecdotal mimicry is expert and devastatingly funny, but it is a warm-up for a personal self-probing. He apologizes for being weak-willed, for he admits he has not lived up to his announced intention of retiring his one-man shows—which brings him to one of his major themes: the vagaries of will. Playing himself as Will, he also plays with the philosophical idea of will as defined by Schopenhauer. Of course, he tells us that he’s reading the Story of Philosophy because he was to have a real life and live moment by moment and not betray his inner motivation for real happiness. All this while he is doing a costume and psyche change into Warren, a divorced gay man who insists on going back to his partner’s house in order to retrieve a windbreaker and a John Denver CD. All he wants is a happy ending—but the show goes through several loops in demonstrating how difficult this is to achieve.

   This Is What Happens Next shows MacIvor’s characteristic charm, wit, satire, and subversive cleverness, but it often seems to be spinning its wheels in overly familiar ground. There is, for instance, the usual sequence of brutally funny characters—in this case, Susan (a lawyer with two problematic daughters), a trans-gender astrologer who has a date with Susan, The Alcoholic Father, The Little Boy who is really Warren’s, no, MacIvor’s inner child—and our writer/performer is generally superb at the impersonations. However, the shape of the piece seems more willed than organic, more melodramatic than natural, and the self-conscious wit (one of MacIvor’s metatheatrical strengths) leads merely to ambiguity rather than genuinely unsettling revelation.

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