Let’s Run Away & Let’s Also Come Home

I’m not sure why I sometimes read other people’s reviews of plays before I write my own. But I was struck in reading some of the older reviews of the newest Daniel MacIvor/Daniel Brooks show Let’s Run Away, which is playing at the Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax until April 23rd, 2023, that folks have characterized it as being so sad. That was not my perception at all … I laughed so much, and so joyfully. 

Of course, I think the conceit does exist, at least in some places, that Daniel MacIvor’s plays ARE, in general, so sad, like how Chekhov is sad if you’re not in on the joke. 

In this play we are introduced to Peter, and it’s immediately apparent that it is Peter who has rented The Bus Stop Theatre for the evening, and that it is actually his show that we have all come to see. Unlike MacIvor and Brooks, Peter is not a legendary theatre maker with years of experience in stage craft and tech, and he and his lighting technician don’t seem to have had a lot of rehearsal, so lighting and sound cues are bumpy from the get-go and Peter, who wants the evening to be perfect so badly, gets more and more aggravated the more things go awry. 

Most of the time when we go to the theatre to watch a play, regardless of how seamless or how overt the lighting, the sound, the mise en scene, and the literal theatre space is, it usually exists as somewhat separate from the story itself. When it doesn’t, and you are in an immersive play-within-a-play sort of structure, that situation usually stems from something in the narrative, something that is happening to blur the fourth wall in that way. In Let’s Run Away the way we experience the room and everything in it comes from the character, it comes from Peter. And this felt like a brand new idea to me, and one that was very playful and fun to watch. How does Peter, an amateur with a story to tell, interact with this space, a professional theatre? How does he interact with this audience, the people who go to the professional theatre space? How does he interact with the crew he has either been given, or maybe assembled himself, who are helping him figure out the lighting and the sound cues for the show as it is happening. At one point we think maybe Peter will run away. 

But does this undermine the story he tells us- that everything happening around the story is not polished, that it is frazzled, and unpredictable? Does this distract us from connecting to Peter, or worse, does it make us dismiss outright the validity of anything he has to say? I think that depends on how much we value the medium over the message. Peter’s story can only be told in Peter’s way, and this is absolutely, immersively, authentically Peter’s way.   

The laughter, though, comes from a different layer, it comes from *knowing,* regardless of how well done the artifice is, Daniel MacIvor isn’t screwing up his words, and Daniel Brooks hasn’t screwed up the direction, and the designers (Kimberly Purtell and Deanna H. Choi) haven’t screwed up the tech. We aren’t laughing *at* Peter, although the comedy is coming from him, we are laughing at how disparate in that moment Peter’s predicament is from anything else we would expect from MacIvor and Brooks. Perhaps this helps us find the humour in the story itself, since we have already exercised our funny bones. Perhaps it makes the moments where the laughter stops more impactful. 

Since MacIvor only plays the one role in this solo show, in a way Peter feels like a deeply nuanced performance very separate from MacIvor the playwright, the theatre maker, the person, this is the “lie we all believe in”, but on the other hand because we have all been plunged so completely into Peter’s world, in a way the play feels more true. Both of these, I think, and even more so the tension between them, is what really honours the story in a beautiful way. 

On paper, yes, Peter’s story is sad. He grew up largely in foster homes, and eventually ran away with the circus. He had a very tangential relationship with his birth mother, beginning with an odd event when he was a teenager which led to them sharing some time together in a motel room where she read to him aloud from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which became an ongoing connection between them. Their reunion doesn’t last, however, and eventually Peter becomes sporadically unhoused, moving from the streets and motels of London, Ontario to Windsor, Ontario and back again. At the end of her life, however, Peter’s mother leaves him a guitar once owned by Sid Vicious, and the manuscript of her unpublished memoir, which explains how the guitar came to be in her possession, and also chronicles some of the ways she has attempted to connect with her son over the years. This is what Peter wants an audience to hear. He wants them to hear it from her side, and also from his side, and he wants to have that public validation that he belonged in his mother’s life. 

I really get that. In 2000 when I was sixteen my father did publish a kind of memoir, a huge brick of a piece of non-fiction, and, unsurprisingly to me,I wasn’t mentioned in it at all. I’m still his secret, unacknowledged child. Peter’s troubles don’t evaporate at the end of the play, but there is a path forward for him, and it’s there in part because he survived the evening performing his story for us. That seems especially “not entirely true, but close” maybe. 

Just before I sat down to write this I read a post that MacIvor wrote on reWork’s Instagram which said in part “Last night at The Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax we opened what is probably Brooks’ and my’s final solo show.” I don’t want to dwell too much on this, but that is where the sad is living right now for me, and I think why I really loved that Let’s Run Away has so much light, and so much fun and playful, and silly, and ridiculous, and laughter, and joy mixed in. They have written seven of these solo shows together since the 1980s- and isn’t that kind of what they have been doing all along? Running away together? Joining the circus of their combined imaginations, and seeing where that would lead? Where they would end up?

It’s all culminated into this moment, right here, at the Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax, until April 23rd. 

Let’s Run Away is co-produced by 2b Theatre and reWork Productions and it plays at the Bus Stop Theatre (2203 Gottingen Street, Halifax), Tuesdays to Saturdays at 7:30pm and Sundays at 4:00pm until April 23, 2023. Tickets are available on a sliding price scale- either $20.00 or $40.00, with even more flexibility in pricing for folks who need it through their Access 2b Program. Tickets are available on this website.

The Bus Stop Theatre is wheelchair accessible and has gender neutral washrooms.

ASL Interpreted Performances will be on Saturday, April 15th and Thursday, April 20th.

Masks will be required at performances on Wednesday, April 19th and Thursday April 20th.