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Accounting woes Daniel MacIvor hits SF with the witty In on It By Robert Avilaa&eletters@sfbg.com
Here's an account of the present moment and how to live in it. Here's also an account of a particular personal history and the attempt to be present in it, to account for it, or to settle accounts with it. Unfortunately, anything beyond that cryptic description of its theme would ruin the fun of watching Daniel MacIvor's In on It unfold. And this 70-minute two-hander is fun. A meditation on loneliness, passivity, depression, and loss has rarely been so zippy. Two ex-lovers, a playwright-actor (Glenn Peters) and another actor (Ian Scott McGregor), take to a practically bare stage to ostensibly work out the details of a new play the first man is writing (James Faerron's set design is dark and spare but somehow comfy and inner-worldly too, with sloping walls and looming black portals). The characters seem intermittently aware they are onstage and discuss and sometimes argue over the details of the play – the plot and characters centering on a middle-aged man named Raymond King who learns of a terminal illness at precisely the moment his wife has decided to leave him for her born-again Christian lover. Each takes turns in various parts, trying out ideas, revealing along the way tensions and memories left over from their own former romance. The two stories intertwine further as the action progresses, a process aided and symbolized by a black silk jacket (captured alone on the floor at the outset of the play, circumscribed by lighting designer Robert Jansen's white spot) that passes back and forth between the actors, their characters, and the layered realities presented. The order of the play-within-the-play thus moves gradually from an occasion for, and passive-aggressive behavior toward, an order that swallows up both the fictional characters and the "real world" of the actors. Encore Theatre's presentation of Canadian playwright-director MacIvor's 2002 Obie Award-winner introduces a well-known and highly respected talent in Canada to Bay Area stages (though MacIvor, also a filmmaker, may already be familiar to festivalgoers; his Wilby Wonderful, for instance, screened at last year's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival). Carefully, subtly written as well as consistently witty, the neatness of In on It contains an inner thematic messiness, highlighting it like the white spotlight on the empty jacket. MacIvor is careful (as both writer and director) to see that In on It never slips into the maudlin or the overly cute – tensions the play actually works to nice effect, in fact, in its thematic contrast between two very different personalities and even existential states, for instance, at one point playing an aria by Maria Callas off against a choreographed bit to an extremely silly Leslie Gore number. To this end he has cast the right actors. New York's Peters and San Francisco's McGregor excel here in sharp, intelligent, malleable performances that can draw us immediately and intently into a characterization, while at the same time never letting us lose sight of the other layer of "reality" around it. Still, things can feel too neat. The final climax, bolstered by Sara Huddleston's impressive sound design, leaves one a little impassive somehow, and that's clearly not supposed to happen. The conceit, in drawing so much attention to itself, inevitably gains some of its humor and subtlety at the expense of that fourth-wall business (the slightly uncomfortable effort one is asked to make to pretend the fourth wall is actually being broken by the actors, instead of the actors as characters pretending to break it, if you know what I mean). But that's caviling on my part, since this is still a show well worth getting in on. SFBG IN ON IT Through Feb. 26 See Stage listings for dates and times. Thick House 1695 18th St., SF (415) 821-4849 www.encoretheatrecompany.org |
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