Daniel MacIvor’s new play New Magic Valley Fun Town, which plays at the Neptune Scotiabank Studio Theatre until April 21, 2019, examines how one Cape Breton family shows their care and support for a family member who can be difficult to love and connect with, when the origin of these longstanding, familial challenges is a deeply held secret.
The play opens in Dougie’s trailer, off the beaten path in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and he is in the throes of a whirling dervish of acute Anxiety and unbridled jubilation at the pending arrival of his childhood friend, Allen, who he has not seen in thirty years. MacIvor’s Dougie is reminiscent of an exuberant eight year old waiting for his best friend to come over for a sleepover, but trapped in the body of an ailing middle aged man, and throughout the play we see the battle play out between his soul and his body. Dougie has been separated from his wife, Cheryl, for fifteen years, and he both relies on and is irritated by her constant protectiveness and invasions of his privacy. She was also friends with Allen when he lived in Cape Breton, and it’s clear that while she is attending the party as a guest, she also wants to make sure she’s there in case anything goes wrong. She tries to manage things, both the details of her loved one’s lives, and also their emotions, but this also causes exactly the kind of outbursts she tries so hard to avoid. Dougie and Cheryl’s daughter Sandy is home for a bit from Graduate School and is excited to meet her dad’s best friend, especially since Allen is also an Academic. Allen arrives in a joyfully awkward reunion where toes are stepped on, boundaries are respected, dancing to Rod Stewart happens, and secrets are revealed that dramatically and emotionally shift everything for this family.
Stephanie MacDonald plays Sandy, and we see two very disparate aspects of her personality and her emotional state in the play and MacDonald does a beautiful job of making the bridge between these two Sandys both clear and, I think for many, poignantly recognizable. Sandy has a challenging relationship with Cheryl, played by Caroline Gillis, and a beautiful relationship with her father, although still an imperfect one. The chemistry between MacDonald and MacIvor is a fascinating counterpart to the chemistry between MacIvor and Gillis, and in it is an examination of how we try to find the balance between pushing others, placating them, and listening to them. Andrew Moodie plays Allen as a friendly, but also mysterious person. I loved that I could never anticipate in Moodie’s demeanour how Allen was going to respond to any situation, whether about something insignificant like whether or not he was going to eat the macaroni cheese, or something far more meaningful, like an overdue conversation about race. Caroline Gillis does a beautiful job of portraying a character who cares so much about everything and everyone, but who also needs to continually let things go, to try to have the challenges and negativity, both in their family and in their community, wash over her like water on a duck’s back. We see both the benefits and the drawbacks of this approach play out as the denouement approaches. MacIvor is funny and charming as Dougie oscillates between frazzled, witty, vivacious and so sweet as a fawning father. There is one moment where something switches in him and he becomes immediately irate, and the way MacIvor gets from vivacious to incensed and then back again is a powerful performance by someone with a profound understanding of human nature.
Helping to navigate these nuances is director Richard Rose, who takes the play expertly from a farcical beginning, to a tender and poetic end, in a way that is seamless and feels like an entirely natural progression. Brian Perchaluk’s trailer set immediately roots us in a specific geographic space that nicely reflects who Dougie is and how important certain aspects of the past are to him.
The title of the play, New Magic Valley Fun Town, refers to an amusement park where Dougie and Allen used to go as adolescents. Their shared experience there bonded them in friendship, and also is the key to so much of what has happened since. Like Sandy’s first entrance, the title is representative of the fact that appearances are often deceptive, and that you often have to dig a lot deeper to find the elusive, complex, and sometimes even contradictory, truth. At the end of the play, the truth has been both spoken and heard, and we are left in the hope of that.
New Magic Valley Fun Town by Daniel MacIvor plays at Neptune’s Scotiabank Studio Theatre (1593 Argyle Street, Halifax) until April 21, 2019. Performances are Tuesday to Friday at 7:30pm and Saturday and Sunday at 2pm & 7:30pm. For tickets please CLICK HERE or call 902-429-7070 (toll-free 1-800-565-7345) or visit the Box Office at 1593 Argyle Street.
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