So who did kill Spalding Gray, the American monologist who died in 2004? Considering that he committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry in New York, you’d think the question unnecessary.

Turns out the question is very much necessary according to Daniel MacIvor’s disarmingly idiosyncratic solo show about himself, Gray, a guy called Howard, and some pretty big issues including death, self-forgiveness and truth.

Principal among those issues is truth. The question of who killed Gray is, after all, a question about the truth, metaphoric or otherwise, of what happened, and as MacIvor makes clear, certainty about any situation or person is a moving target. While that’s hardly a stop-the-presses insight, the ways in which the playwright frames that target make for a fine 85 minutes.

The show, directed by Daniel Brooks, is a skein of stories and enacted pieces that link MacIvor, Gray and Howard in progressively inextricable fashion.

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Photo, courtesy of the Edmonton Journal.

About one hour and twenty minutes elapse, just enough time to give the public a chance to see that Daniel MacIvor is a masterful story teller who holds the audience’s undivided attention, to the point where you can hear a pin drop. And it almost doesn’t even matter what MacIvor is saying because his natural demeanor and relaxed manner are so disarming, we fall quickly under his spell. This is verbatim theatre, but then it’s also MacIvor being MacIvor, using all his tried and true stage strategies such as his reading, to the audience, a negative review by Robert Cushman that hurt, or doing one of his unexpected interviews with the audience. In fact he invites a young man at the front to come on stage and answer a few questions. This is not a plant! It’s authentic. The young man happened to work in the ticket office and the actor asked him questions that in fact, gave us a resumé of the play. That prologue was clever and when the audience was ready, away went the actor with his own narrative.

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Soprano Neema Bickersteth. Photo John Lauener

Cette production multidisciplinaire, une création mondiale, a marqué l’ouverture du festival culturel annuel promu par le Centre national des Arts à Ottawa. Cette année, « la scène d’Ontario » est à l’honneur. Parmi les 90 événements prévus, dont la danse de toutes les origines, les « arts médiatiques » ainsi qu’une grande variété de musiques classiques, populaires et traditionnelles, il y aura des rencontres littéraires (anglophones et francophones) et une quinzaine de spectacles de théâtre.

Le chant du siècle nous ramène aux expériences scéniques et musicales de John Cage sauf que ce contenu est autre. L’unique artiste en scène, la soprano Neema Bickersteth, une figure sobre, jeune et filiforme, dont la belle voix d’opéra, puissante et dramatique est le socle dramatico-musical de la soirée. Sans paroles, le spectacle nous raconte par des images, l’histoire de la femme noire au Canada. Appuyée par des paysages filmés, des intérieurs qui se transforment à vue d’œil, tous les effets visuels indiquent la remontée dans le temps à travers les proscéniums qui encadrent l’espace de jeu. Dans ce contexte, la soprano adopte une gestualité inspirée de la danse moderne afin d’indiquer l’évolution des rapports entre cette femme et son milieu socio-culturel. Grâce à un sens de théâtre hérité des spectacles de John Cage, du jeu transgressif de Mauricio Kagel qui subvertit tous les instruments qui lui tombent sous la main, et un texte d’Alice Walker (À la recherche des jardins de nos mères), l’équipe du Volcano Theatre a réussi un événement d’une excellente qualité visuelle et musicale.

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