Theater Review—

A Worthy Introduction To The Talented Playwright Daniel MacIvor

By Julie Stern

NEW MILFORD — If you’ve ever sat in the audience watching a modern play and found yourself squirming — a little tired, say, of David Mamet’s recurring perseverance, or Sam Shepard’s gallantly cheerful gothic, or Harold Pinter’s portentous delivery of non-sequiturs, with their implication of ominous overtones, and you wondered a bit how the actors could stand up there on the stage delivering those lines — then you should really get a kick out of This is a Play, the curtain-raiser at Theatreworks New Milford’s latest offering of two short works by the Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor.

Lisa and Chris Simo-Kinzer and Sonnie Osborne are a trio of actors struggling to please both the writer and the director of a play that makes absolutely no sense to them. Crochety old Auntie (Osborne), her “fragile” niece (Lisa Simo-Kinzer), and a strutting stranger (Chris Simo-Kinzer) are involved in a story about three lonely heads of lettuce. As the dialogue manages to parody all of the above playwrights, as well as (I think) Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and William Inge, Osborne keeps up a hilarious running commentary on the stupidity of the whole enterprise. Meanwhile, the vain but vapid “male actor” keeps tripping over his lines as he tries to make sense of them, and the “fragile” Lisa Simo-Kinzer mutters resentful warnings.

The whole thing is a tour de force for Osborne, who is as good here as I have ever seen her in local theater, and MacIvor’s  skewering of pretentious modern theater disarms the viewers before his more substantial second play goes on, after the intermission.

Never Swim Alone, which is the advertised production, uses the Simo-Kinzers again, along with Brian Reid, in a study of the testosterone-heavy rivalry that exists between two young stock market traders.

Bill and Frank are ostensibly good buddies. Cut from the same cloth — wearing identical outfits, riding the same commuter train, having similar families, and recalling how they spent their summers together as boys — they stand on the beach, posturing for the benefit of a girl in a blue bathing suit, who sits in the lifeguard chair and keeps score as they insult each other with deepening menace.

Periodically she interrupts to challenge them to a swim, saying “race you to the point…” As this line resonates, it starts to become clear that this is connected to some memory of the past, while “the point” seems to fluctuate in meaning between the rocks at the end of the bay, and the “point,” or meaning, of the play itself.

Where the first play is very funny, the second is laden with sinister undertones. The acting by the two men is deftly suggestive; the good buddy banter barely masks an underlying brutality and bitterness that comes out in their needling and put-downs.

It takes a long time to build up to the climax that finally reveals the buried secret, and at times it reminds one of the recent movie Memento in its continual restarts, but it is definitely worth sticking with.

MacIvor is an original talent, and TheaterWorks has given him a worthwhile staging, by way of introducing him to American audiences.