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‘The jester’ holds court in creative look at privilege

Daniel MacIvor at the Tarragon.
SETTING THE SCENE: Celebrated playwright Daniel MacIvor takes a break during preparations for the, the Yorkville-set Cake and Dirt at the Tarragon Theatre.

It’s less than two weeks before the curtain goes up on Daniel MacIvor’s newest play, Cake and Dirt, and the technical crew is diligently converting the Tarragon Theatre’s mainspace into a Yorkville penthouse for what will be the celebrated playwright-director-performer’s last show as playwright-in-residence.

It’s a position he’s held at Tarragon since 2007. But following a suggestion from artistic director Richard Rose, MacIvor won’t be directing Cake and Dirt himself. That honour goes to playwright and voice director Amiel Gladstone. But the 2006 Governor General’s Award winner still looks every inch the artist facing an impending deadline as he enters the Tarragon’s main lobby: clad in blue jeans and a black-and-white houndstooth sweater, he simultaneously gives the reporter his full attention while looking as if only a moment ago he had prevented the sky from falling.

“My two favourite words in the rehearsal hall are ‘No’ and ‘Wrong’,” he says. Then, gesturing in a new direction each time he switches between the two words, he indulges himself: “No! Wrong! No! Wrong! No! No! Wrong! Wrong! No!”

“I don’t feel that ‘no’ closes creativity,” he said afterward, in summary. “I think it actually focuses it.”

MacIvor said Gladstone, a British Columbia native, brought a “west coast calm” to the project, helping the cast discover their characters, like a masseur, when he would have treated them with the sure but less-delicate touch of a chiropractor.

The play opens Wednesday. It centres around the 50th birthday of Jeff (David Storch), a member of Toronto’s old-guard upper class, whose ex-wife Bryn (Maggie Huculak) throws a party for him at the four-floor penthouse condominium they once shared. It is narrated by Riley (Bethany Jillard), Jeff and Bryn’s newly sober 25-year-old daughter and, typical of MacIvor’s unconventionally structured work, begins the morning after the party. Not until Act II does the audience get to see what happened the night before.

Asked why he arranged the plot that way, MacIvor coyly replied that any faux-thematic answer he would give would be distracting from the real reason: “Because I did.”

“I knew that we saw the events after, and then we saw the before, and I knew there would be four scenes … and that one would be the post-party kitchen moment,” he said. “There were going to be six people, and they were all a little bit drunk, and nobody was really listening, but everybody was talking.”

In addition to the narrator and her parents, the cast includes Jeff’s second wife, Naline (Laara Sadiq), next-door neighbour Jason (Patrick Kwok-Choon), a ward councillor who MacIvor describes as a blend of Olivia Chow, Rob Ford and Adam Vaughan; and Nina (Maria Vacratsis), the family’s Greek housekeeper of 20 years.

The reasoning behind the Yorkville setting is twofold: MacIvor needed a setting that could believably have greenspace in a high-priced area that was being converted into a community space, and an ideal place to help the play examine the causes and consequences of privilege. He said he chose to set the show in Yorkville after noticing a shift in how visitors and residents have flaunted their wealth during the past decade.

“There used to be a kind of reserve around the $3,000 purse and the Chanel suit and the $500 haircut and the glasses,” MacIvor remarked. “Now if you go and wander through Yorkville today it’s the uniform… We’re wearing the money as a status symbol.”

Though he certainly mines dark humour from his characters’ experiences, MacIvor said he also loves them, noting that their flaws are rooted in the very human fear of showing weakness. For his privileged cast, “weakness is death.”

“You never show it, so you’re always the most powerful person in the room,” he said.

Though proudly coming from a working-class background, having grown up in Nova Scotia before moving to Toronto more than 20 years ago, the 52-year-old MacIvor has more than a little first-hand knowledge of the world he’s depicting.

Citing a dinner with then-Gov.-Gen. Michaëlle Jean and her “entourage” at his Cabbagetown home as an example, he quips: “It’s kind of medieval — as the jester, you’re admitted to court.”

That sort of proximity to privilege often breeds a kind of privilege itself, he said. It is illustrated in the play in the person of the Greek housekeeper.

“Am I pointing a finger at those people? No. Because I’m benefitting from it too. The problem is not really with an individual. It’s systemic.”

Regardless, MacIvor doesn’t think the play’s real-life analogues would be insulted by their depiction onstage.

“The people in the play wouldn’t come to the Tarragon,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s too dirty.

“They might go to the Royal Alex to see Angela Lansbury, and complain she wasn’t in the play enough. Or say it was dated, and have to be reminded it was written in the ’30s…. Their level of interest in culture is minimal.”

Cake and Dirt runs at the Tarragon Theatre until April 12.